If you are a U.S. citizen and wondered why back in the fall when the U.S. signed the agreement in Tokyo you didn’t hear anything about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, it might be because U.S. media ignored the event. Newspapers Reporting On ACTA, Sept 1 - Nov 1, 2011According to LexisNexis[1], only 13 newspapers covered the story between September 1 and November 1, 2011; the agreement was...

This is what happens when competition is, basically, non-existent. On Friday, Engadget reported that AT&T would be doubling its upgrade fee from $18 to $36. Wireless devices today are more sophisticated than ever before. And because of that, the costs associated with upgrading to a new device have increased and is reflected in our new upgrade fee. This fee isn’t unique to AT&T and this is the...

Over in Europe, thousands of citizens are protesting, and government leaders are backpedaling (the EU signed the treaty), the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Negotiations over ACTA began in the Bush White House and were ratified by Obama. Last October, the U.S. joined Australia, Canada, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco, and Singapore in signing the agreement [1]. In 2010, Margot Kaminski (Yale...

The data points sound horrifying: 46 percent of American children enter kindergarten lacking the basic language skills they need to learn to read 61 percent of low-income children have no children’s books in their homes The verbs convey urgency (currency is an intentional affect, as the factoids are used for fundraising, establishing organizational mandates) and imply that the data are current. But...

This video, apparently made by angry father Tommy Jordan, has “gone viral” and had more than a million views in under 72 hours, with a torrent of commentary. Most of the commentary seems to express either enthusiastic support or simple shock. I suspect it will get a few million more hits before it dies down or the father pulls it down. I am assuming this is real and not a staged prank. Assuming...

For a global business community still experiencing economic pain, Facebook’s humongous $100 billion Initial Public Offering has been an emotional shot in the arm. For French business newspaper Les Echos, columnist Philippe Escande praises the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as being at the heart of what still makes the American business sector the greatest in the world. For Les Echos, Philippe...

Update: The material appears to have been developed with grants from DOJ, not directly by DOJ. Ten years ago, the Bush Administration pushed a new program, Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Operation TIPS), designed to entice Americans to snitch on their neighbors. From Reason magazine: TIPS in essence deputizes 1 million Americans in 10 cities as government informants. (That’s just the beginning...

Will Outrage Extend To $2M In Severance Payments? Twitter Mentions Of Komen, Per TopsyThe chart from Topsy Labs says it all: 306,000 mentions on Twitter in seven days. In seven days, the total number of tweets mentioning Komen increased by almost 50 percent. But this contextual stat is equally startling: over the same 7-day period, there were 507,000 Twitter mentions of the Super Bowl, America’s greatest...

We will find out in ensuing months the bones underneath this decision and what really happened; how reliable a non-profit can be to reverse itself twice in a few days. We’ll follow along for now, but it may have had something to do with Komen’s corporate sponsors. I’ve rec’d several emails yesterday and today asking that all write to Komen’s food and entertainment sponsors to protest...

Warren Buffett’s complaint about his secretary paying more in taxes than he does is having a global ripple effect. According to columnist Helena Garrido of Portugal’s Jornal De Negotios, the debate on tax fairness in the United States should be food for thought in Portugal, where the economy is in a tailspin and thanks to widespread tax evasion and tax avoidance, tax revenue has plummeted. For the...

UPDATE: See posts atop the fold about Komen rescinding their decision to withdraw funding and future applications for funding from Planned Parenthood, dateline Feb 3, 2012) Duke, a progressive university with a strong med school may have ‘a problem, Houston.” They’ve invited Brinker along with four other notable people to do 2012 commencement. Problem may rise up with parts of vocal student...

Yesterday, in a YouTube/Google Plus town hall, President Obama finally admitted to what the world has known for years: that the United States has been using drone aircraft to kill militants in among other places, America’s supposed ally, Pakistan. This editorial from Pakistan’s The Nation welcomes this admission of the obvious, but wonders how the president could claim that most of those killed...

Updated 4 February, in the wee hours of the morning: An alert reader, who looked at Schedule J more thoroughly than I did, noticed that former Komen CEO Hala Moddelmog, the woman who stepped down in November 2009, received $279,734 the following fiscal year as part of her severance package. Others receiving severance: Annetta Hewko ($134,483), Kimberly Earle ($271,781) and Marianne Alciati ($208,231). Holy...

The Goodreads/Amazon story is a great example of why concentrated economic (market) power is not in the consumer’s long-run best interest. In this case, Amazon wants to protect its bundled product, the Kindle. The Kindle is to Amazon as Office or MSIE are to Microsoft, extensions of an infrastructure franchise. Over at Google, it’s two pronged: Google+ and Android. At Apple, it’s the iTunes...

Obama, 2012 SOTU, White House PhotoIn 2007, Google and YouTube broke into presidential politics by holding a “debate” in conjunction with CNN. At the time, Google had owned YouTube for less than a year. Flash forward almost five years. On Monday at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, Google+ (which is also less than a year old), is the stage for a presidential response to last week’s State of the Union address....

Maybe: Academy of Sciences published a study purporting to show how psilocybin, the active ingredient in what are known as “magic mushrooms” is helpful in the treatment of depression, PTSD and anxiety. Another study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found similar results. Meantime, researchers around the world have been experimenting with Ecstasy, whose active ingredient, MDMA, has...

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

And What It Means To You Photo @PCBritzGoogle, the “don’t be evil” company, is slipping and sliding along a fibre optic cable that terminates in Dante’s inferno. According to The Guardian: US regulators are reportedly looking into whether Google manipulates its search results to favour its own products and have expanded the investigation to include Google+. That’s a far cry from...

Proponents dubbed the bill the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.” Critics say that the name is misleading because the bill would create a database of every “every digital act by every American.” The Obama Administration Department of Justice has lobbied for these expanded record-gathering and -keeping powers. According to the CRS bill summary for HR 1981 (wow,...

Israeli Ambassador to the USA Dr. Michael Oren (a native of New Jersey) spoke this evening at Cincinnati’s Mayerson JCC. It is still rather icy out and over 700 people came to hear him. These are not his exact words, just my notes on some things he said: Someone asked how we live with uncertainty – we do it every day and have done so since 1948. Keeping in mind what Iran has done without...

In 2009 filmmaker Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson began collecting 15 second user-created scenes of the original Star Wars. The project, dubbed Star Wars Uncut, grew a devoted following, even winning an Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media in 2010. Now, the 472 segments have been edited by Aaron Valdez and Michael Pugh into a full 2 hour remake. And Pugh and Wilkinson have posted that...

Congress has capitulated, at least temporarily. Both Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-NV) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) have tabled their “copyright piracy” bills, PIPA and SOPA, respectively. But rest assured, these bills are NOT dead. This isn’t the first time rights holders have demanded political action and it won’t be the last. Prior TMV coverage: Breaking:...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

I have a little different view than the Twitterverse and blogosphere on the technological (which seems to be epub3/html5) and legal handcuffs surrounding Apple’s foray into textbook publishing.. As I understand it, Apple’s restrictions are on the sales of iPad-specific books – not PDFs – that are created with the free Apple publishing tool. (I guess I’ll finally have to update...

Update 3, 3:20pm Pacific: Last week a British court ruled that a British student can be extradited to the U.S. for running a website with a .com address that linked to sites with pirated TV shows and films. Get used to copyright as the argument for America as a virtual Gitmo. Note: SOPA/PIPA not required for US Customs to treat links to allegedly copyrighted material like murder. Update 2, 3:05 pm Pacific:...