The 27 largest U.S. companies reporting cyber attacks say they sustained no major financial losses, exposing a disconnect with federal officials who say billions of dollars in corporate secrets are being stolen.

MetLife Inc., Coca-Cola Co. (KO), and Honeywell International Inc. were among the 100 largest U.S. companies by revenue to disclose online attacks in recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Citigroup Inc. (C) reported “limited losses” while the others said there was no material impact.

We decline to abandon our usual reluctance to endorse standing theories that rest on speculation about the decisions of independent actors.

If the law were otherwise, an enterprising plaintiff would be able to secure a lower standard for Article III standing simply by making an expenditure based on a nonparanoid fear.

The upshot is that (1) similarity of content, (2) strong motives, (3) prior behavior, and (4) capacity all point to a very strong likelihood that the Government will intercept at least some of the plaintiffs’ communications, including some that the 2008 amendment, §1881a, but not the pre-2008 Act, authorizes the Government to intercept. At the same time, nothing suggests the presence of some special factor here that might support a contrary conclusion. The Government does not deny that it has both the motive and the capacity to listen to communications of the kind described by plaintiffs. Nor does it describe any system for avoiding the interception of an electronic communication that happens to include a party who is an American lawyer, journalist, or human rights worker. One can, of course, always imagine some special circumstance that negates a virtual likelihood, no matter how strong. But the same is true about most, if not all, ordinary inferences about future events. Perhaps, despite pouring rain, the streets will remain dry (due to the presence of a special chemical). But ordinarily a party that seeks to defeat a strong natural inference must bear the burden of showing that some such special circumstance exists. And no one has suggested any such special circumstance here.

Consequently, we need only assume that the Government is doing its job (to find out about, and combat, terrorism) in order to conclude that there is a high probability that the Government will intercept at least some electronic communication to which at least some of the plaintiffs are parties. The majority is wrong when it describes the harm threatened plaintiffs as “speculative.”

A major issue is that no research was carried out before introducing the legislation in order to understand just what its wider effects might be -- pretty much the only exploration of the consequences is in Cory Doctorow's "Pirate Cinema", the Techdirt Book Club's current choice. That's typical of the evidence-free way that copyright legislation is drawn up and passed, but it is particularly unforgiveable here because some belated research shows just how serious the knock-on damage is likely to be for some:

Teenagers who do not have access to the internet in their home have a strong sense of being 'educationally disadvantaged', warns the study. At the time of the study, the researchers estimated that around 10 per cent of the teenagers were without online connectivity at home, with most of this group living in poorer households. While recent figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest this dropped to five per cent in 2012, the researchers say that still leaves around 300,000 children without internet access in their homes.

The researchers' interviews with teenagers reveal that they felt shut out of their peer group socially and also disadvantaged in their studies as so much of the college or school work set for them to do at home required online research or preparation.

That's just as well, since this new research suggests that the knock-on consequences for young people caught up in this scheme would have been serious and long lasting as far as their employment prospects and social integration were concerned. Moreover, it's not hard to see that the impact on everyone in the families affected would have been similarly disproportionate in terms of cutting them off from online government and business services that are now practically indispensable for modern life.

It's shameful the governments concerned either didn't even consider these issues before plunging ahead with their "three strikes" laws, or did, but simply didn't care about the suffering they would cause. In either case, it shows once more how they are more interested in pleasing their friends in the copyright world than in serving the people that elected them.

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Our data suggest that the three principal arguments in favor of copyright term extension—under-exploitation, over-exploitation, and tarnishment—are unsupported There seems little reason to fear that once works fall into the public domain, their value will be substantially reduced based on the amount or manner in which they are used. We do not claim that there are no costs to movement into the public domain, but, on the opposite side of the ledger, there are considerable benefits to users of open access to public domain works. We suspect that these benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.

Our data provide almost no support for the arguments made by proponents of copyright term extension that once works fall into the public domain they will be produced in poor quality versions that will undermine their cultural or economic value. Our data indicate no statistically significant difference, for example, between the listeners’ judgments of the quality of professional audiobook readers of copyrighted and public domain texts.

Kip Hawley doesn’t argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular—knows what it’s doing.

He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they’re not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested. He wants us to trust that the deployment of expensive full-body scanners has nothing to do with the fact that the former secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, lobbies for one of the companies that makes them. He wants us to trust that there’s a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic lightsaber that’s really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).

At this point, we don’t trust America’s TSA, Britain’s Department for Transport, or airport security in general. We don’t believe they’re acting in the best interests of passengers. We suspect their actions are the result of politicians and government appointees making decisions based on their concerns about the security of their own careers if they don’t act tough on terror, and capitulating to public demands that “something must be done”.

In 2004, the average extra waiting time due to TSA procedures was 19.5 minutes per person. That’s a total economic loss—in –America—of $10 billion per year, more than the TSA’s entire budget. The increased automobile deaths due to people deciding to drive instead of fly is 500 per year. Both of these numbers are for America only, and by themselves demonstrate that post-9/11 airport security has done more harm than good.

The current TSA measures create an even greater harm: loss of liberty. Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.) And if you’re on a certain secret list, you cannot fly, and you enter a Kafkaesque world where you cannot face your accuser, protest your innocence, clear your name, or even get confirmation from the government that someone, somewhere, has judged you guilty. These police powers would be illegal anywhere but in an airport, and we are all harmed—individually and collectively—by their existence.

There are many Types of Intellectual Property, and all of them are bad, and most of them are getting worse and expanding. The worst two by far are patent and copyright. Some say the patent system is worse than copyright, because most innovations are inevitable anyway and there is no independent inventor defense, whereas it’s unlikely someone else would independently write Romeo and Juliet (of course, Shakespeare had no copyright and he borrowed freely from previous stories, but let’s not let facts get in the way of the romanticized notion of copyright). This argument overlooks the fact that copyright prohibits not only literal copying but non-literal copying of “similar” aspects of the copyrighted work and also the making of derivative works.

Others think copyright is worse because it lasts longer, for example.

Length. The patent term is about 17 years, while copyright usually lasts over 100 years (life of author plus 70 years).

Trends. Copyright law keeps getting worse, while patent law has been basically the same for a while now, and in fact has slightly improved–in recent years it’s more difficult to get injunctions; and the recent patent reform law, the America Invents Act, actually added a general prior commercial user defense, the first significant legislative improvement to patent law … ever.

Taxation versus Censorship, the Police State, and Regulation of the Internet. The patent system imposes costs of at least $100 billion a year, by reducing innovation and competition. So it basically acts like a tax. It’s bad, it impoverishes us, it slows things down. But it’s just another tax.

The copyright system, by contrast, besides imposing untold billions of cost on the economy, consumers, and artistic creation, and distorting the entire domain of creative works, is also being used as an excuse by the state to increase its surveillance, warrantless searches and seizures, punitive bans of people from the Internet without due process, censorship, cutting off websites accused of piracy, and control and regulation of the Internet and related technologies. As the Internet is one of the most significant tools ever to emerge to help people battle the state and communicate and learn and spread ideas, this is very chilling. In the name of stopping copyright piracy, the state is trying to squash mankind’s greatest anti-state weapon. Taxes are bad, but killing or restricting the Internet is just horrible.

It's remarkable that these lawyers were able to conclude to their satisfaction that their named plaintiffs in fact had their payload data captured in the process--presumably by confirming that payload data was actually being transmitted at the precise time the cars drove by. I'm not sure how I would research this issue sufficient to satisfy my Rule 11 obligation, but these attorneys surely didn't just assume Google captured their clients' payload data...did they?

"The licensing requirements are still too bureaucratic and costly, particularly for non-commercial groups such as sports clubs, not-for-profit establishments and organisers of occasional events. Our report calls on the government to relax restrictions in this area, which in some cases are unnecessarily draconian, and in others simply absurd."

This article argues that copyright law, at least as it is applied in many cases, is unconstitutional. When there is no harm to the copyright holder's incentives, copyright law burdens speech without serving any countervailing governmental interest. Thus, the First Amendment requires proof of harm in copyright infringement cases. Consistent with the government interest in encouraging innovation, the harm requirement would allow a finding of infringement only where the copyright holder can show that the defendant's use is likely to cause real harm to the copyright holder's incentives to create or distribute copyrighted works. As such, the harm requirement would allow restrictions on speech only when necessary to keep the "engine of free expression" running. Although the harm requirement is no panacea for all speech issues in copyright law, it would help courts to identify and eliminate cases involving false conflicts between the First Amendment and copyright -- that is, cases in which there is arguably a speech interest in allowing the defendant's use and no speech interest in prohibiting it.

The current era of intellectual property is waning. It has been based on two faulty assumptions made nearly three decades ago: that since some intellectual property (IP) is good, more must be better; and that IP is about controlling knowledge rather than sharing it. These assumptions are as inaccurate in biotechnology – the field of science covered by this report – as they are in other fields from music to software.

An analysis of IP laws alone gives a distorted understanding of how IP facilitates innovation and dissemination. Such an analysis must be complemented by an understanding of business and governmental practice as well as the public and private institutions and entities that create, grant and govern IP.

• On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents
• Patents, Copyrights And Trademarks, Oh My!
• If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?
• What Kind Of Progress Are We Promoting?
• Why Do Patents Tend To Cause More Harm Than Good?
• The Case For And Against Software And Business Model Patents