Erstwhile TLF blogger Tom Pearson draws an analogy between Harry Potter and copyright law:
One of the most interesting passages in the new HP is on page 517 regarding Goblins’ views on property. I may be reaching a bit, but the first thing I thought of was intellectual property law. According to the passage, Goblins consider the maker rather than the purchaser of an object to be its true owner. Indeed, the purchaser is seen as merely renting the property. This sentence seemed particularly apt: “They [Goblins] consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard-to-wizard without further payment, little more than theft.” That strikes me as the approach taken by the RIAA and MPAA toward copyrights and is fairly close to the Randian conception of IP as well.
So, am I grasping at straws here?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
In his latest column for The Hill, The American Enterprise Institute’s John Fortier has a critique of the Holt bill that I found rather frustrating:
Election administrators have weighed in with a dose of reality. There is no way to implement nationwide paper trails by the 2008 elections, nor by 2010. House leaders have floated a compromise to delay implementation, but to require simple cash register-style paper trails in 2008. This also will not work.
The expedited timeline for these changes is driven by activists who are convinced that manufacturers like Diebold or clever hackers are likely to commit massive voter fraud. Some have even come to the position of opposing electronic voting machines altogether, even those with paper trails. They now advocate for voting on paper alone, counted by hand. While this might work in some parliamentary systems, where voters cast a single vote on a ballot, try counting ballots by hand in California, with 20 offices up for election and 20 more referenda. And paper ballots are also susceptible to fraud through ballot-stuffing or lost or defaced paper ballots.
What is needed is a modest push for paper trails, with flexibility for states and federal money to help states move in that direction over a six-year period.
This modest approach will not please those who now favor voting only on paper. One request: If you have comments about this column, no e-mails, please–write to me on paper.
The critique of paper ballots here is breathtakingly inane. Hardly anyone is opposing the use of optical-scan machines to count paper ballots marked by voters, because the results of optical-scan ballot counting machines can always be verified with a hand recount. And of course, the retort in that final sentence is a complete non-sequitur.
Like virtually all defenses of e-voting I’ve seen, the piece does not even mention, much less respond to, the substance of the anti-e-voting argument. Fortier’s argument, if we can call it that, is limited to portraying us “activists” as paranoid luddites who are just opposed to technological progress. That ignores the fact that the critics of e-voting include a significant number of computer science professors and a whole lot of computer programmers. These are not people with a knee-jerk opposition to technology, as such. Rather, they are people who understand the limits of technology well enough to know that touch-screen voting is a bad idea.
Mike Masnick points to this excellent post on Jon Healy’s blog at the Los Angeles Times. According to Live365, RIAA music accounts for less than half of all music webcast.
The problem is that, as Jamie Plummer explained in an issue of TechKnowledge a couple of months ago, every artist and every Internet radio station has to participate in the RIAA’s cartel collection agency, SoundExchange, whether they want to or not. As I understand it, artists are not permitted to sign separate contracts setting lower webcasting rates for their music, nor are artists allowed to give blanket permission to play their music for free.
This is a classic example of industry incumbents using the legal system to maintain artificially high prices. In a free market, lesser-known artists would offer webcasters discounts in the hopes of getting more play time. That, in turn, would put pressure on the majors’ royalty rates, as more webcasters shifted to playing less expensive music. But thankfully, Uncle Sam has stepped in and rescued them. Like the ICC of old, SoundExchange legally prohibits artists from charging unfairly low prices, ensuring that the labels don’t face unfair competition.
There’s enormous interplay between the policy landscape and people’s expectations. Easy to forget, because expectations are an awful lot like assumptions… taken for granted.
DRMWatch reports on two new surveys finding that consumers are more accepting of DRM.
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Dave Weigel reports on one of the unintended consequences of the copyright lobby crusade to criminalize anything vaguely connected to piracy. Some college kid wanted to capture a 20-second clip of the movie Transformers and so she brought a camcorder into the theater. Now she’s facing a fine of $2500 under “zero tolerance” anti-camcording laws.
The darknet critique applies to anti-camcording laws as much as it does to the DMCA. Once one copy of a movie leaks onto peer-to-peer networks, it rapidly spreads throughout the darknet. So unless you can get the rate of camcording down to zero, which is essentially impossible, these sorts of laws won’t stop anyone from getting ahold of pirated movies.
On the other hand, they can impose disproportionate penalties college kids who commit the crime of not being sufficiently familiar with the minutia of copyright law to know that taping a 20-second clip of a movie is a federal crime.
As James points out, there’s already a lot of huffin’-and-puffin’ going on about Rupert Murdoch’s deal for The Wall Street Journal. (Just look at the silly things that presidential candidate John Edwards had to say today about it). The City Journal has just posted an editorial I have written responding to this hysteria…
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“Rupert Murdoch, Meet Chicken Little”
by Adam Thierer
8/2/07
Help, the sky is falling! So say the pro-regulation media agitators at Free Press, which fired off what is sure to be the first of many hysteria-ridden press releases about Rupert Murdoch’s successful acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones & Co. “This takeover is bad news for anyone who cares about quality journalism and a healthy democracy,” argued Robert W. McChesney, president of Free Press. “Giving any single company—let alone one controlled by Rupert Murdoch—this much media power is unconscionable.”
The argument that the Murdoch–Dow Jones marriage will have a significant impact on American journalism or democracy is absurd. Don’t get me wrong. The Journal is a great paper; in my opinion, it represents the pinnacle of journalistic excellence. Nonetheless, it’s just one of many voices shouting to be heard in today’s media cacophony. Indeed, the modern media marketplace is extraordinarily dynamic, with new outlets and technologies developing constantly. Despite the existence of a handful of very large conglomerates, dozens of other important media companies continue to thrive and fill important niches that the big firms have missed. As Columbia University’s Eli Noam has noted of the modern media marketplace, “While the fish in the pond have grown in size, the pond did grow, too, and there have been new fish and new ponds.”
Read the rest of the piece here.
e-gold has always been an interesting company – an alternative value-transfer system that’s not attached to government currency because it’s backed by gold. The payments business charges much more than my gut tells me the service should cost; any competitor in this market should be welcome. And I’m no expert in monetary policy, but I know that fiat money (“this has value because the government says it does”) is dangerous because it relies on the credibility of the government that issued it, and because governments regularly inflate their fiat currency by printing or minting more of it. This diminishes the value of the currency in our hands.
But money is a sensitive area – governments are pretty protective of their prerogatives – and e-gold hasn’t always done such a good job making the case for itself. Suspicions about the use of this service may have culminated recently in an indictment against e-gold officials alleging conspiracy to launder money and various regulatory infractions, which met with a strenuous response from them.
Now e-gold is going to tell it’s story, putting a human face on what they’re trying to do. No, it’s not this video. They’ve started a blog. It should be interesting and educational. I’m listening to an interview with e-gold’s Chairman, Douglas Jackson, right now.
The idea of an asset-backed, non-governmental value-transfer system is very attractive to me, and an indictment is not a conviction. I think it’ll be worthwhile to get e-gold’s side of the story, and they definitely need to tell it in Washington, D.C.
Does Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones face serious obstacles at the FCC? The almost universal opinion has been “no”. Big as it is, News Corporation and Dow Jones don’t really compete against each other in any significant markets. The only real FCC concern would be the newspaper-television crossownership rule. But, although New Corp owns a station in New York City, the nationally-circulated Walll Street Journal — under FCC precedent –is not considered a New York paper.
Nevertheless, Michael Copps — a Democratic commissioner at the FCC — warned that the deal was not a “slam dunk.” “Not so fast,” he wrote in a statement issued from his office yesterday. “What’s good for shareholders of huge media conglomerates isn’t always what’s good for the public interest or our civic dialogue. We should immediately conduct a careful factual and legal analysis of the transaction to determine how it implicates specific FCC rules and our overarching statutory obligation to protect the public interest.”
The overall message here is clear. Translated from regulator-speak, it’s like the cop on the beat who stops someone to say “I don’t like the way you look. I can’t think of anything to charge you with now, but given enough time I’m sure I can find something”.
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The Economist has an interesting overview of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones this week. The piece, “Murdoch Gets His Trophy,” highlights the negotiating skill exhibited by Murdoch in the whole affair, from the timing of the offer to his spot-on reading of the Bancroft family’s internal politics.
That said, the magazine questions the wisdom of the purchase. It’s unlikely, The Economist argues, that Dow Jones will provide to New Corporation anything near the $5 billion Rupert paid.
“Which is why,” it says,” some News Corporation shareholders suspect that they are just excuses, and that Mr Murdoch has put his longtime desire to own the one of the world’s great newspapers before any serious consideration of value for money.”
Wouldn’t it be ironic — after all the hand-wringing over the undue power the acquisition supposedly gives New Corporation — if the biggest loser turns out to be News Corporation itself?
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