Congress in 2002 set up a program giving airports the option of having private employees conduct screening operations. Unfortunately, TSA was put in charge of deciding which locations could participate. A total of 16 out of 440 commercial airports nationwide got into the program before TSA Administrator John S. Pistole slammed the door shut last year.

[T]op Democrats want the TSA to continue rejecting applications to the program "until the costs and possible benefits can be accurately assessed," as Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, urged.

Right now, the performance of private screeners is assessed under a process directed by TSA. It's not particularly surprising that this government agency is going to do everything it can to limit potential competition. Congressional auditors found, "TSA has not conducted regular reviews comparing private and federal screener performance and does not have plans to do so." The agency isn't about to document its own relative failure.

At Ronald Reagan Airport, for example, angry flyers aren't given a form they can turn in on the spot to document their concerns. Instead, they're handed a tiny, easily lost sliver of paper containing TSA's website and mailing address.

Those who bought games for a PlayStation 2, original Xbox or Nintendo GameCube could receive up to $6.79 per title. Games purchased for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii will garner a $1.95 refund, reports USA Today.

In a statement, law firm Hagens Berman says EA will create a $27 million fund for players who purchased a recent copy of any Madden NFL, NCAA Football or Arena Football title.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Everyone wants mobile broadband and the benefits it will bring. But few seem willing to pay for it – including both the over-the-top players, who are generating vast new demand through their applications, and consumers, who have become accustomed to unlimited packages.

This is putting tremendous pressure on mobile operators, who need to invest in high-capacity broadband networks in order to maintain quality of service as demand rises.

At the same time, as broadband becomes increasingly viewed as basic infrastructure for social and economic development, operators are being asked to extend the reach of their networks to under-served populations.

These are strategic, bottom-line issues, and we need to be talking about them.

Nokia and Microsoft are colluding to raise the costs of mobile devices for consumers, creating patent trolls that side- step promises both companies have made.

This lawsuit is a bald effort by Honeywell to inhibit competition from a promising new company and product in a field that Honeywell has dominated for decades. Nest Labs, with its Nest Learning Thermostat, has generated consumer and critical enthusiasm around the home thermostat -- a device that most people had long since written off as a bland, dumb appliance.... That "blah-looking controller" on the market today is very often from Honeywell, which has long dominated the thermostat market, but has yet to generate a device that offers ordinary consumers as much as the Nest Learning Thermostat. Instead of countering product innovation with its own new products, Honeywell has a track record of responding to innovation with lawsuits and overextended claims of intellectual property violations.

"The more competitors you have, the less efficient the allocation of spectrum will be," he said. "It's got to change. I don't think the market's going to accommodate the number of competitors there are in the landscape."

For starters, software often does not require the type of heavy investment that should result in a 20-year monopoly. Instead of expensive laboratories or years of testing for FDA approval, for example, you often just need a coder and a computer. Even complex programs don’t require 20 years of exclusivity to recoup their investment. Software patents are often not even necessary for successful businesses: Facebook and, yes, Google — never relied on software patents to grow their early businesses.

Software patents are also notoriously vague and difficult to understand, making it impossible for small inventors to navigate the system without expensive legal help. And that brings us to the most dangerous aspect of software patents: litigation.

It turns out that software patents are nearly five times more likely to be the subject of litigation as other patents. In fact, lawsuits surrounding software patents have more than tripled since 1999, and they have become part of the price of doing business in America. Take Spotify. After realizing much success in Europe, Spotify launched its U.S. product in July, and just weeks later it found itself facing a patent suit.

Perhaps most troubling, the patent system fails to recognize how people create and use technology. Software is fundamentally situated as a building-block technology. You write some code, and then I improve upon it — something the open source community has figured out. Google’s use of Java in its Android OS also demonstrates how innovators create, by making its own product and and incorporating some elements of the Java language (which, incidentally, Java’s creators have a history of supporting). And when those two come together, it results in an incredibly popular product, here the Android OS.

You've all seen the stories. The sky is falling, the end is nigh, music will come to an end, people sharing their knowledge and culture and thus disrespecting the copyright monopoly rips the bread out of starving artists' children's kittens' mouths, yada yada yada.

What I can't understand for my life is why this industry's profits are even being debated. Who cares how much money a particular industry makes? That is not relevant at all for the form, size and shape of our most basic civil liberties as they apply online.

Let me try an analogy. When mankind communicated privately 30 years ago, our parents sent physical letters in the mail. They wrote a message by hand or with a typewriter on a piece of paper, put the paper in an envelope and sealed it, wrote the recipient's home address on the outside of the envelope, manually affixed a stamp to pay for delivery, and put it in a mailbox. The postal service would then physically carry the envelope with the letter inside to its recipient's home, where it could be read. This delivery took a day or a couple of days, just like when we order new shiny gadgets today and things need to be physically delivered.

So, let's take a look at what rights our parents had in this scenario. First, they and they alone determined whether to identify themselves as sender - on the outside of the envelope, for the delivery services to know; on inside of the envelope, for only the recipient to know; or frankly, not at all. That was their prerogative. Nobody had the right to open letters in transit just to see that they didn't contain any illegal material, and nobody was allowed to track who was communicating (sending letters) to whom.

It is perfectly reasonable that we demand these fundamental rights of our parents' private communications to carry over into the online world, to our children's equivalent environment of life.

Now, once you say that anybody should be able to send anything to anybody on the net without interference, because that's in the civil liberties that our ancestors fought, bled and died for, the copyright industry jumps in and complains. "We can't make any money if you allow this to happen", they would say.

My response is "So what?".

The role of any entrepreneur is to make money given the contemporary constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties, even if - and perhaps especially if - they are unable to make money in the face of sustained civil liberties.

If the copyright industry can't sell their products in the face of sustained civil liberties, they get to go out of business or sell something else instead. Mustard, perhaps.

The important trap to observe here is that it's not our problem if the copyright industry's sales are slumping - whether they are or not. It is irrelevant to the debate on civil liberties online. By starting to discuss the profits issue, the copyright industry wins the framing of the debate - that they should somehow have a right to such profit; that society must be shaped so they can continue to make a profit. No entrepreneur gets that luxury.

The copyright industry is not a stakeholder in copyright monopoly legislation. They are a beneficiary. There's a difference.

The only stakeholder in the copyright monopoly legislation is the public. The copyright monopoly is a balance between the public's interest of having access to culture and knowledge, and the same public's interest of having new culture and knowledge created. That's it. Those are the only two interests that go into the legal wording of the monopoly.

The copyright industry, meanwhile, profits from the current means of achieving this balance - just like Blackwater Security (or whatever their name is this week) profits off of United States foreign policy. (You remember Blackwater, the private security firm that was playing GTA IRL on the streets of Baghdad?) Actually, let's stick with Blackwater for a while. Can you imagine what would happen if Blackwater was considered a legitimate stakeholder in US foreign policy, and whose tantrums were taken seriously when they demanded more opportunities for profits in the foreign policy, violating people's civil liberties in the process?

Can you really imagine what would happen if the concern for Blackwater's continued profits would be allowed to take center stage, ahead of people's sustained civil liberties? I'm betting we would see about the same thing that's happening to the net right now with the copyright industry's equally asinine tantrums. This is the crucial difference between a beneficiary and a stakeholder.

Just because the copyright industry has benefited from this monopoly construct in the past, that doesn't mean that they have any right whatsoever to profit from it tomorrow. That's not a concern at all in reforming the copyright monopoly. In drafting such legislation, our only concern is maximizing the knowledge and culture available to the public.

Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. Follow him as @Falkvinge on Twitter, read his private blog, or get him for a keynote.

People in corporate and political suits alike are climbing on top of one another to be the most statesmanlike in stating "We are fully committed to the copyright monopoly, but these proposed enforcement laws are just nuts," worded in all the synonyms you can find in a thesaurus.

Why? Why do people feel forced to phrase their views on policy like that?

If the enforcement laws are nuts, but still needed for the monopoly to be effective, why is the part before the "but" there -- where people say they support the copyright monopoly, but are firmly rejecting the laws needed keep it in effective existence for a few more years?

For I believe that the copyright industry is actually right that these ridiculous laws are needed to sustain the copyright monopoly. General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech, and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can't be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly. And these are the laws we're seeing on the table.

There comes a tipping point when somebody says that this entire system of cultural monopolies is absurd. A tipping point where the part before the "but" is unceremoniously and collectively dropped, the part that didn't count anyway. A tipping point where everybody just stops pretending to support it. I think it is time to create that point on the history line.

For what is the copyright monopoly, anyway? It is a set of monopolies from the era of guild-regulated commerce, when privately dictated monopolies were the norm and the expected. Specifically, the eldest tradesmen in every guild dictated what, where, and how trade happened within that craft. The copyright monopoly is a remnant from this era that should have been thrown out with the establishment of free enterprise laws in the 1850s.

Also, it is not really one single monopoly, but five quite different ones that are lumped together under a common umbrella term.

The first two types of copyright monopoly are commercial monopolies on duplication and public performance. These are the monopolies usually broken by today's free communication, the monopolies that can't coexist with today's technology and sustained civil liberties.

Then, there are two kinds of moral rights - droits morals. There is the right for the creator to prevent any performance, derivation, remix, satire, etc. of a piece that they do not approve of, and there is the right for a creator to be credited as such.

(I actually support this last right -- the right to credit. But does it really require legislation? The social, corporate and academic penalties for plagiarism are much higher than those of the law. Why is that particular law needed, then?)

The fifth monopoly isn't technically part of the copyright monopoly, but is frequently called "copyright" anyway. It is the so-called "neighboring rights" that were the result of the record industry's corporativization as IFPI in then-fascist Italy: the duplication monopoly over specific recordings. This, too, is broken by today's free communication.

I sometimes hear the old guard say that there would be no culture if there was no copyright monopoly. That is an outrageous insult to creators all over the world today. We create not because of a monopoly, but because of who we are; we have created and shared culture since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls. Today, about eight years' worth of video are uploaded to YouTube every day.

People today create not because of the copyright monopoly, but despite it.

The second common question is how the artists shall get paid. That, too, is a red herring. First of all, it is not a policy problem, and second, it is not a problem at all.

This pretense from the old guard goes well in hand with the origins of the copyright monopoly. It was never for the artists at all. When the copyright monopoly was first created on May 4, 1557, it was a means of censorship of political dissent. It lapsed in 1695. When it was reinstated in 1709, it was at the request of printers and distributors who had gathered their families on the stairs of English Parliament to claim that no culture would be printed or distributed if they didn't get their monopoly reinstated.

Nobody at the time thought to claim something as preposterous as the copyright monopoly being a precondition for people wanting to create culture. It never was.

On the contrary, it is a guild-era instrument. To show a parallel, buttonmakers in France in the 1600s went berserk when tailors bypassed them and made buttons out of cloth instead. They demanded the right to invade people's homes and search their wardrobes for violations of the guild privileges. Sound familiar?

Another parallel also happened in France, where certain popular printed cloth fabrics were monopolized. People manufactured them anyway, and the nobility responded with increasingly harsh punishments for violations of their monopolies, up to and including death by torture. Even the death penalty didn't stop that copying. How far is the copyright industry prepared to go? They never answer that question.

Any law must be necessary, effective, and proportionate: it must identify a real problem that needs legislation, it must solve that problem, and it must not create worse problems in the process. No aspect of the copyright monopoly meets these three legislative quality criteria. Therefore, I reject the concept as a whole.

I reject and oppose this monopoly that was never for the creators, but always for the distributors: a guild whose time is up and obsolete, and which has no business trampling on our civil liberties.

Let's see more people drop that part before the "but". If the copyright industry is right in saying that these laws are required to maintain the copyright monopoly, and I think they are, then that just underscores how we should stop pretending to endorse this guild-era monopoly, and instead say it is time for it to go.

And nobody will think the worse of you for stating that opinion. Quite the opposite. Nobody expects an honest politician or corpsuit.

Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. Follow him as @Falkvinge on Twitter, read his private blog, or get him for a keynote.

Mr Raab said that the effect was to suppress Foundem in Google search results. Mr Raab pointed out that the alleged treatment of Foundem would be sufficient to bury and kill off many businesses. He accused Google of deliberately "stacking the deck" against small competitors and called for government policy to address what he called ‘search engine transparency'.

Mr Raab accused the regulators, Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading, of complacency. He called on them to take action against companies abusing dominance. "Search engines are the gateways to the Internet, and with a 95% share, Google is in a dominant position"

"If Google does not allow consumers to access potential competitors via its search engine gateway, they will be choked out of the market-place" he said.

For all the modern angst about violent computer games, this innocent-looking board game has probably had a more corrosive influence on western morals. For starters, Monopoly brazenly encourages players to plunder their savings and put every last penny into property.... Most pernicious of all Monopoly's venal influences, however, is surely the Community Chest card that says, "Bank error in your favour, collect £200." There's no suggestion you should alert the bank to its mistake when you can buy a couple more houses and profit by some idjit's error.