When Slashdot first started up, it automatically put the name "Anonymous Coward" into its comment system for anyone who chose not to leave a name. When we started using Slashcode ourselves in the early days, we followed suit, and have kept it up ever since (which still gets amusing when people assume all of the Anonymous Coward comments are by the same person). However, it looks like a malicious hacker (or, cracker, if you must) in Chile has decided to take that name a bit further. After stealing data on 6 million Chileans (including the daughter of the president) and posting it all online, it came out that the hacker was using the name "Anonymous Coward" to brag about his exploits. Hopefully, the Chilean police don't now try to shut down Slashdot.

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Following New York's decision to change its laws to force Amazon.com to collect sales tax for New York-related transactions, other states are apparently going back and reevaluating Amazon and taxes. Texas, for example, has been alerted to the fact that Amazon probably should be paying sales tax in the state. This is different than the situation in New York. The rule has always been that, if the company has a "physical presence" in the state, it is required to collect and pay sales tax. The question in New York was what counted as a physical presence. Amazon doesn't have offices or a distribution center in New York, but New York was trying to claim that all its Amazon affiliates in New York represent a physical presence. In Texas, however, Amazon actually does have a physical presence in the form of a distribution center. It's just that the state of Texas didn't recognize that until someone from a Dallas newspaper pointed it out. So even if Amazon is successful in fighting the law in New York, it looks like the renewed interest in forcing online retailers to collect and pay sales tax is catching up to Amazon in other ways.

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The Universal Service Fund (USF) is a huge boondoggle for telcos, who keep getting more and more money out of it, with almost no oversight into what's done with that money. And, the way it's set up, it actually blocks more innovative (and cheaper!) services from being used to improve connectivity in rural areas. It's good to see others are beginning to notice this. News.com is running an article from Gregory L. Rosston at Stanford who points out that the USF rewards companies for being the least efficient providers. That is, by showing how much more it costs the telcos to provide for rural users, the FCC grants them even more money. In other words, the less efficient they are, the more money they get. Not exactly the type of incentives the FCC should be setting up -- but given FCC chair Kevin Martin's super chummy relationship with the telcos, perhaps it's no surprise.

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This shouldn't come as much of a surprise (if at all), but as Slashdot points out, there are many driving distractions out there, and all can be potentially dangerous. The study found that it's not just mobile phones, but eating or changing the radio station or even talking to others in the car. Basically, what the study found was that when there's cognitive overload from too many tasks performed simultaneously, activities that are more core may squeeze out less developed processes. Thus, speaking and listening (which are learned at a young age) are likely to squeeze out more recently learned processes, such as driving.

While this isn't at all surprising, what does it mean for the various attempts to legislate against driver distractions? Despite some attempts to ban distractions one by one, it's never going to be possible to ban all driver distractions. You can't make it illegal to talk to someone else in your car or even to change the radio station while driving (though, who knows...). The real issue shouldn't be to focus on banning each and every driver distraction, but in educating drivers to the dangers they face with those distractions, making it clear that they need to be extra careful while engaged in any such activity, and that it's best not to do any such thing in heavy or highly variable traffic. Yes, there will always be some folks who ignore this and assume they can drive just fine with these distractions -- but those people would do the same thing even if the distractions were banned.

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With the entertainment industry actively pushing for laws that would require ISPs to kick users off the internet for file sharing, using a "three strikes" policy, Michael Geist is wondering if they've quietly succeeded in Canada. Apparently a French newspaper is reporting that Canadian ISPs are negotiating such a policy already, though there have been no such public statements. Given how secretive the industry and the government have been about new copyright laws, perhaps this isn't too surprising. We do know that the industry was pushing for greater ISP liability as part of copyright law changes a few months back, so it wouldn't be surprising if ISPs were negotiating a "three strikes" type rule to avoid the liability issues. Of course, they probably want to keep it secret, as publicity (and resulting anger) about these types of laws in Europe has at least some politicians moving away from them. However, as the entertainment industry does keep succeeding in getting these types of laws to move forward, how long will it be before similar laws are proposed in the US, with "everyone else is doing it" as part of the reasoning?

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After the TV writers' strike from earlier this year, we noted that the final settlement actually was not in the best interest of the writers, even though they got much of what they wanted in demanding royalties from online usage of their content. The actors unions are now gearing up for that same battle, as well, as they, too, are demanding rights over online usage, including royalties and the right to demand permission before any of the works they appear in can be used online. It's difficult to feel sorry for Hollywood producers here -- as they very much brought this on themselves, convincing lots of people that they should get paid every single time any of their content was used. Thus, it's no surprise that the writers and the actors are now demanding the same rights.

However, just as it was wrong for the producers to be demanding a fee for every usage, so is it wrong for the writers and the actors to be demanding such a fee. All it will do is make it much more difficult, time consuming and expensive for any of that content to go online. And that will open up much wider opportunities for other content to go online instead, decreasing the overall value of the content made under these agreements. It's hard to fault the actors (like the writers) for looking out for their short-term interests and demanding the same sorts of things that the producers have demanded of everyone else -- but it's setting up a bad situation over the long-term, where the studios under these agreements won't be able to adapt to the changing media landscape.

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With in-flight internet access getting closer and closer to reality for many airlines, there are still plenty of questions about etiquette and acceptable behaviors. Some airlines are purposely setting up content filters and blocking the use of VoIP (as much as possible, since it's possible to get around most blocks), but as Broadband Reports points out, some believe that people will self-regulate, in most cases. People surfing porn at open WiFi hotspots hasn't been a huge issue, because people know that others are around and so they have enough self-control. The same should be true on airplanes. And while we all know people who are oblivious to how rude it is to hold a loud mobile phone conversation in public, a few reminders and social cues may be enough to keep that from being a serious problem in the air. There will be exceptions -- but is trying to eliminate those few exceptions worth having a near total ban on certain activities?

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The New York Times reports on MySpace's new Data Availability project, which will allow third-party websites to automatically import information from a user's profile, saving the user the hassle of re-entering it on a bunch of different sites. As the Bits blog says, this is a smart move and could be the start of an important trend toward making MySpace a more outward-focused platform. Facebook wasted no time in announcing a program of its own called Facebook Connect that will have similar functionality. And now it looks like Google will rolling out an extension for Open Social that will provide some of the same features. We've said before that the achilles heel of social networking sites is that they're so inwardly-focused. In the long run, it's going to be difficult for any site—even one as large and technically savvy as Facebook or MySpace, to get users to stay inside of a walled garden. The site that figures out how to be a platform that other sites use for identity management will have a huge advantage in the long run. MySpace and Facebook appear to regard this kind of outwardly-focused platform as the next frontier in social networking.

They're going to face some serious challenges in the privacy department, though. We discussed the privacy dilemma with Facebook apps back in January, and both Facebook and MySpace are going to have to grapple with the same set of issues with their new strategies. On the one hand, they need to lock things down sufficiently that one bad (or compromised) application can't suck down a ton of private user data and do bad things with it. On the other hand, if they are too restrictive, it will limit the usefulness of their platforms and discourage third-party websites from using them at all. Striking this balance, and coming up with security mechanisms that give sites the information they need without giving away the store, will be crucial to these initiatives' success.

I think it's possible that these problems will prove intractable. Ordinarily, when we talk about an "open API," we mean an API that anybody can use without any kind of pre-approval, and that doesn't constrain how data received through the API is used. Obviously, MySpace and Facebook aren't going to want to offer an API that's open in this sense; there's too much potential for mischief if an application can trick a user into authorizing a malicious application. So unless they can come up with a really elegant mechanism for limiting the spread of information, there's going to have to be a vetting process, which will mean extra overhead that limits how quickly the platform can grow. It's going to take a lot of ingenuity to make these platforms open enough that a lot of potential partners can participate while keeping them closed enough that they don't become vehicles for the bad guys to cause problems.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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It amuses me sometimes when people get angry at a position we take, and say to us something along the lines of "well, if you're so upset about it, stop talking about it and do something," as if talking about it doesn't help to bring about change by getting many others interested as well. Thus, it's always nice to see when a story does help generate change. Last week, one of the stories we had that got the most traffic was about EA's use of controversial DRM on some hyped up new games. The DRM would require a regular internet connection and would regularly check in on users. The comments on that post were harsh, with many swearing never to buy those games -- and many wrote EA about those concerns as well. A bunch of other sites picked up on the uproar as well, and late Friday, EA agreed to cut back on the DRM plans. It's not a total capitulation, as there will still be some DRM used -- it just won't be quite as onerous as originally planned.

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While many people are familiar with copyright issues concerning things like music, movies and software online, there's another community that also has been quite active: the knitting community. For a few years now there's been an ongoing battle between hobbyist knitters who have uploaded patterns that others feel are infringing on their copyrights. Now it appears that issue is touching on the tech/sci-fi community as well. Boing Boing points us to the news that a fan of the famed BBC show Dr. Who had created some knitting patterns of his own that would enable anyone to knit various characters from the show. This isn't a case where he was uploading someone else's patterns -- but he had created his own. The BBC, however, flipped out and told him to remove all such knitting patterns as they infringed on the BBC's copyrights and trademarks. This seems like yet another case of overly aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rights because someone can, not because it's a good idea.

It's nearly impossible to see how a fan getting people to knit versions of Dr. Who characters somehow diminishes the rights of the BBC. All it's doing is enabling fans (who are also into knitting) to express their fandom. If anything, the BBC should be encouraging this kind of fan support, rather than trying to stifle it and shut it down. It's stunning that after all these years, people still don't realize that helping fans express their feelings towards something is a good thing, rather than infringement.

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While it looks like the attempt to get Rick Frenkel, better known as the "Patent Troll Tracker" into court on a separate patent-related dispute has gone nowhere, there's an interesting side dispute as part of this that touches on the age-old debate concerning the border of blogging and journalism. Frenkel told the court that since the Troll Tracker blog was a side project, not an effort of Cisco, and since he was, effectively, a journalist in writing it, he could not be compelled to testify since it "would result in a serious detriment to Frenkel's future ability to gather and disseminate news."

However, Frenkel's nemesis, patent attorney Ray Niro responded by scoffing at these claims, and ticking off the reasons why Frenkel should not be considered a journalist. Unfortunately, in doing so, Niro displays a rather profound ignorance concerning what it means to be a journalist (one would hope that his work with patent hoarders is not so sloppy). In the link above, Joe Mullin does a good job picking apart Niro's points, but let's take a closer look. First, Niro says Frenkel is not a journalist because he's unqualified: "Frenkel has no degree in journalism; no professional training as a reporter; and has never been employed as a reporter or journalist." If that's a requirement to be a journalist these days, then an awful lot of folks doing serious journalism work wouldn't be considered journalists either. There are no professional requirements to be a journalist. Second, Niro claims that Frenkel wasn't very nice in his posts, highlighting the Troll Tracker's rather amusing "haiku" contests, that tended to make fun of patent hoarders and (sometimes) Niro. Of course, there's nothing in engaging with your readers with amusing haiku contests that makes you any less of a journalist. Third, Niro says that since Cisco was Frenkel's employer, he's clearly not a journalist but something of a corporate mouthpiece. Of course, there's little evidence to suggest that Frenkel was doing anything on behalf of Cisco, but more importantly, (as Mullins points out) biased reporting doesn't disqualify you from being a journalist. If it did, how many "journalists" would still be around? And fourth, Niro claims that Frenkel was guilty of various journalistic ethics violations, such as writing anonymously (someone better alert the Economist) and not revealing his sources (always knew that Woodward and Bernstein weren't real journalists).

The simple fact is that you don't need a degree or a certificate to be a journalist these days. You just need to report the news -- and no one can deny that Frenkel did that. In fact, he was much more of a journalist than many "official" journalists these days in that he reported on news that wasn't getting covered anywhere else and did some pretty hefty investigative work on some to try to work out the details behind some of the patent hoarding company shell games. In fact, since he took down his site, the type of news he reported has been sadly missing from the discussions on patent law and patent reform. On that note, it's probably also worth pointing out that Frenkel said in his own filing on the case that he's planning to return to blogging at some point in the future.

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Copyright and patent law is supposed to act as incentives for the creation of new content or inventions. Yet, as we've pointed out recently, there's little economic evidence that it does so. Instead, the evidence suggests that stronger intellectual property laws seem to come after the fact. In other words, when there is little IP protection, there is often quite a bit of creation and invention -- and then those that did that creation and invention decide that they want to protect it retrospectively. That's not the purpose of IP law, but it's what seems to happen. And, look no further than China to see it happening again. China, of course, is notorious as a haven for intellectual property infringement, which (not surprisingly) has resulted in business model innovation. However, now that China is hosting the Olympics, it's suddenly worried about making sure the video of the games will be copied in an unauthorized manner (found via Against Monopoly). Note the obvious irony. You can walk around malls in parts of China and buy any kind of unauthorized software, music and movies for next to nothing... but when it comes to China's own content, suddenly copyright is a big deal. And, of course, it wasn't copyright that acted as the incentive for China to host and show the Olympics -- but now the country is using it to protect the content. Copyright is being used for protectionism, not as an incentive.

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While it is a bit troubling that the Department of Homeland Security has had some computer security problems recently, it's difficult to see exactly how that's solved by legislation. But, of course, to politicians with a legislative hammer, every little problem looks like a nail. Thus, we've got politicians proposing cybersecurity legislation that would require Homeland Security to decrease the number of successful cybersecurity attacks against its network. While that's certainly an admirable goal, it's not as if DHS was purposely letting the attacks go through before, and will suddenly shape up just because of this new law.

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Tom wrote about the Skype/GPL case yesterday, and it's worth noting (as many in the comments did) that partway through the hearing, Skype gave in and agreed to drop the appeal and abide by the lower court ruling. That's a good thing. However, from the comments on Tom's post, it appears that many seemed to have misunderstood what he wrote, believing he was (a) supporting Skype or (b) disparaging GPL. It appears to be neither. He pretty clearly states that it's a "desperation" play by Skype, and so it's not at all surprising that Skype gave in after the court indicated that Skype's arguments were not convincing. Tom also does not appear to be disparaging the GPL -- he notes how it helped encourage much more openness in software development.

His actual point, which got less attention, was whether the power of the GPL specifically is waning as other licenses gain prominence -- and, specifically, whether it would be so horrible if the GPL somehow went away. He's not suggesting that's a likely or ideal scenario -- just questioning what would happen. And, the point he makes is that while the GPL paved a very important path, we're seeing other options now appearing, and that's a good thing for open source. Developers now have a much bigger choice among licenses they can choose to adopt, and that competition can lead to interesting innovations. It's not an anti-GPL post -- but recognition that the hopes and dreams of open source software development are no longer tied to the success or failure of the GPL. And that's a good thing for both the GPL and open source.

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William Patry points us to an interesting draft of an article by Prof. Shyamkrishna Balganesh (of University of Chicago Law School) for the Harvard Law Review concerning how the courts rarely take into account the real purpose of copyrights in deciding what copyrights allow people to do. The basic premise is that copyright is designed solely to be an incentive to get people to create new works -- and, as such, some of the powers that the courts and Congress have added to copyright seem to go well beyond that core purpose. Specifically, Balganesh suggests that copyright shouldn't prevent others from using the content in ways that the original author never foresaw, as those uses clearly should not have influenced the original incentive to create, since they were never even thought about. While Patry gives some compelling reasons why Balganesh's current argument is a bit flawed, it does bring up a variety of interesting and important questions concerning what copyright really should be doing.

Most specifically, this argument is going to become more and more important as content creation increasingly moves away from a "broadcast" model to a many-to-many "communications" model. In such a world, things like fair use, derivative works and whether someone should "own" all downstream uses become much more important: None of copyright's current doctrinal devices enable courts to circumscribe a creator's entitlement by reference to the incentive structure that the institution is premised on. As a direct consequence, creators (and their assignees) are often thought to be 'rightfully entitled' to any revenue stream associated with their creation, whether or not it owes its existence solely to the creator and regardless of it having been developed well after the creation of the work.... Individuals will (and can) not factor the unforeseeable consequences of their actions into their ex ante reasons for acting. Consequently, limiting copyright's grant of exclusivity to uses of the creative work that were foreseeable to a creator at the time of creation is likely to better align creators' creative decision-making with their incentives. In other words, just because your work is used in part by another to create something new and different, it often doesn't make sense to give the original creator control over that work -- especially if it has nothing to do with the original incentive to create. Somehow, I'd imagine that JK Rowling would disagree.

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At least 10 states have tried to ban the sale of violent video games to kids, and in each and every case, the laws have been found to be unconstitutional. Yet that doesn't stop state governments from trying... and apparently the politicians at the federal level (election year!) want in on the action too. They're proposing a bill that doesn't exactly ban the sale (which is probably how they hope to get around the Constitution questions) but which requires stores to ask for an ID as well as to post details about the ESRB ratings. This seems like yet another "protect the children" political move by politicians up for re-election. But, it's becoming increasingly clear that these types of laws aren't necessary, no matter what constitutional questions they may raise. Beyond the absolute lack of evidence concerning problems from kids playing violent video games, it appears that the industry has taken care of the problem by itself. Self-regulation by stores has resulted in a significant decrease in underage kids being able to buy mature video games. But don't let facts get in the way of those pushing for these types of laws. They're applauding the new bill, just as they demonstrate that they don't even understand what they're campaigning against.

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If you've got a spare 40 minutes to an hour, it's worth watching patent attorney Stephan Kinsella's presentation: Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely, as given in March. The video is embedded below, and it fits in nicely with my ongoing (yes, there's still plenty more) series of posts on intellectual property. It's pretty rare to see a patent attorney explain so lucidly the problems with patents (and copyrights): He does a very nice job ripping apart the "property rights" arguments that some, especially some libertarians, use in favor of patents, explaining why that doesn't make sense. It's an excellent presentation, and well worth watching.

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theodp writes "Americans are a real problem, explains Bank of America in a just-disclosed patent application for County Assessment. 'A typical American employee,' complains BofA, 'demands a high salary, good benefits, a good work environment, vacation time, and other job-related perks.' Such problems are solved with BofA's patent-pending methodology, which eliminates 'demanding work force' problems by identifying another country for a corporation to relocate its work force to."

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In the past we've joked about the (supposed) fact that the song "Happy Birthday" remains under copyright, due to a copyright originally held by sisters Mildred and Patti Hill, the claimed original authors of the song. However, William Patry points us to a fascinatingly detailed research paper into questions surrounding the copyright. What comes out of it is pretty strong evidence that the copyright is not valid -- but it's never gotten far enough in court to have a decision rendered. Plus, it sounds like many aspects of the "history" of the song really appear to be close to a myth.

The sisters in question may have written the melody, but they almost definitely did not write the lyrics (their original copyright was on a different set of lyrics, "Good Morning to All"). As for the melody, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it was actually taken from a series of extremely similar songs. So, there's a good chance they wrote neither the melody nor the lyrics. Also, there are numerous questions concerning whether or not the copyright holders correctly followed the various rules required of copyright holders at the time, suggesting that even if there were a legal copyright at some point, it's long since expired. And, of course, there's even some evidence to suggest less-than-legal tactics involved with transferring around some of the interest in the song. Amazingly, however, the legitimacy of the copyright has never been determined in court, and it now generates over $2 million per year. Over 1% of the money that ASCAP distributes to songwriters is for this one song, even though it may not be legitimate. Somehow, I doubt this is what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution.

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Joe Mullin has the details of a rather bizarre patent dispute involving a patent covering the user interface of force feedback technology used in "cybersex" or "teledildonics." You may have heard of the company Immersion, which, for years, has claimed to hold pretty much all patents on "haptic" technology, which most people are familiar with in the form of "force feedback" game controllers for console games. Some feel that Immersion's patents are overly broad, but that's beside the point on this one. Apparently, at some point, Immersion realized that there was going to be (or already was) a decent sized market in using such haptic technology for virtual sex. Yet, at the same time, the company felt uncomfortable about filing infringement lawsuits on such uses, recognizing that it could lead to negative publicity. So, instead, it licensed out the patents and the right to sue for infringement to a company called Internet Services, LLC (ISLLC), which (from the description in Mullin's article) sounds like a shell company just for this purpose.

However, when Immersion won its patent infringement lawsuit against Sony for its use of force feedback controllers on Sony gaming consoles, ISLLC apparently felt that Immersion owed it some of the proceeds. It hired famed patent attorney (and patent system expert) Mark Lemley to represent it. However, for somewhat unclear reasons, Lemley now appears to want nothing whatsoever to do with ISLLC and has asked to withdraw from the case. ISLLC has now hired other lawyers just to force Lemley to still represent it in its lawsuit against Immersion. It's like a patent battle soap opera -- complete with sex toys. See, just because stories are about patents, doesn't mean that they're not sexy.

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