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I’ve been busy with other projects, like the panel discussion on privacy I did with fellow TLFer Jim Harper, but I’d like to jump in on what is now an old story. Variety, among many others, reported on June 9th that the EU resolved its qualms with Apple after Jobs and company agreed to standardize pricing policies across Europe.

Apple has been charging consumers in the UK 10% more than the rest of Europe, but Variety failed to mention why this policy was in place. The EU determined that neither Apple nor the recording companies that distribute through iTunes were varying prices in order to take advantage of consumers. Instead, as The Business Times aptly reported, the price differences were attributable to, “copyright laws specific to individual countries.”

So, Apple was pricing differently in different markets because of genuine differences in those markets, not because Steve Jobs secretly hates limeys.

What I found most disturbing about the reporting on this case was this statement from European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes:

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C|Net News reports that DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker called today for national ID checks when Americans buy prescription drugs. This is yet another in a growing list of activities that federal authorities would bring within their control should the national ID system created by the REAL ID Act be implemented.

The eminently savvy Baker was unintentionally ironic when he reportedly said he “doesn’t ‘understand’ the civil liberties objections to the plan.”

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In less than a decade, Google has grown from a Ph.D. research project to be the indispensable tool of the information economy. With the objective of making all information instantly and universally accessible, Google now controls the principal index to the internet and the email traffic of millions, while adding new features such as maps replete with street-level photos cataloging the non-virtual world.

How should governments around the world treat this data? Is it a great new resource for national security and law enforcement, or should we protect it from the prying eyes of bureaucrats? Should private companies be reigned in by regulation, or will government action only serve to undermine the modicum of privacy we maintain in the information age?

On January 16th Americas Future Foundation (AFF) will be hosting a roundtable to discuss these and other questions.

The panelists:

• Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
• Amber Taylor of O’Melveny & Myers LLP
• Jim Harper of the Cato Institute
• Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (me)

The event will take place at the Fund for American Studies, 1706 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, near Dupont Circle. Drinks at 6:30; Roundtable begins at 7:00. Roundtables are free for AFF members, $5 for non-members. So join today! Please RSVP to Cindy Cerquitella at cindy@americasfuture.org.

Hopefully we’ll see some TLF fanboys at the event!

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Creating a work can cost authors a lot, whereas copying a work costs others very little. Absent copyright, then, authors might find it discouragingly difficult to recoup the costs of creating fixed expressive works. Authors might then underproduce expressive works, and the public consequently suffer.

To avoid that policy tragedy, the Copyright Act empowers authors to control the reuse of their fixed expressive works. By selling those special statutory privileges, authors can offset their production costs. Thus does copyright arguably do what the common law allegedly cannot: ensure that the public enjoys an adequate supply of expressive works.

The benefits of copyright policy come at a price, however. Although it may cost a great deal to make the first copy of a fixed expression, it usually costs very little to make and distribute subsequent copies. Absent copyright protection, those works would constitute public goods. Copyright bars the public from freely enjoying the very goods labeled “public.” Instead, the Act vests copyright holders with the power to charge whatever the market will bear to escape liability for infringement. Though the monopoly rents that copyright holders thereby win allegedly provide a necessary stimulus to creativity, non-holders suffer the opportunity costs of losing cheap access to fixed expressive works. Most commentators thus understand copyright policy to aim at striking a balance between giving authors sufficient incentives to create expressive works and providing the public with adequate access to the works thereby created. [The figure below] illustrates that, the standard economic model of copyright policy.

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As part of a 20 minute slide show produced by the New York Dept. of Criminal Justice, Elliot’s Spitzer’s administration has cited a well-known Internet hoax as a helpful resource for parents.

The site cited, Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence (mavav.org) claims to be:

organization is dedicated to educating parents of the world’s fastest growing addiction and the most reckless endangerment of children today: Video Game Addiction and Violence in Underground Video Game Cultures

The site goes on to claim that:

Video game addiction is without a doubt, becoming this century’s most increasingly worrisome epidemic, comparable even to drug and alcohol abuse. All the while, the video game industry continues to market and promote hatred, racism, sexism, and the most disturbing trend: clans and guilds, an underground video game phenomenon which closely resembles gangs.

MAVAV is actually the creation of a New York design school student, a well documented fact that is easily uncovered by research. And by research I mean about 2 minutes Googling the farcical organization. Too great a burden for the NY DOJ.

The NY Justice Dept. report also contained a reference to several over-hyped stories of questionable reliability and is riddled with errors. In addition, the report claims that Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was a Counter-Strike player, a claim that has since been shown to be unsubstantiated.

If this is the worst indictment that the insidious legal mind of Elliot Spitzer can produce, gamers might not have to worry about New York’s proposed regulation of video game sales.

Hat tip: GamePolitics.com

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I blogged about Greenpeace’s quarterly report on Green-Tech last week, noting that the way they display their data is manipulative, but turns out the data itself is deeply flawed.

John Timmer writes at ArsTechnica on just how poorly this quarterly report is researched:

The research in general appears lazy. Nintendo’s failing grade appears to be based entirely on this entry in the corporate FAQ, which briefly summarizes some of the steps the company has taken to protect the environment. Anything that’s not covered there is simply rated “No Information.” Similarly, all of the information on Microsoft originates from press materials and corporate statements on the company’s web site. Clearly, Greenpeace did not perform an exhaustive evaluation of chemical use through the manufacturing pipeline.

So, even if you think the shifting numbers on the graph aren’t misleading, it turns out that the whole study is pretty worthless. If an eco-friendly rating is based on cursory searches of the manufacturer’s own reports, then the best PR department wins, not the best practices. Greenpeace, along with many other environmental groups, refer to the all-PR approach to going green as”green washing.” Ironic that Greenpeace itself is now doing a bit of the scrubbing.

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The front page of the Wall Street Journal Marketplace section today gave me some hope that my work and the work of many other libertarian geeks has had an impact. The WSJ concluded that while there are dominant forces like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in the online advertising field, that the dynamism of the market allows for upstart companies to grab their share of the $16.9 billion online ad industry.

Pointing out that markets are dynamic and that dominance is at best temporary and always under threat from competitors or future competitors seems like economics 101, but the job nonetheless needs to be done. Our collective memory seems to resemble that of a goldfish as many in the media believe that Google is, always has been, and always will be the dominant force in online advertising.

Of course, if market dominance really perpetuated itself, MITS would dominate the PC market. After all, in 1975 the MITS Altair 8800 outsold its closest competitor, the IBM 5100, two to one. This despite the 5100’s advanced cassette tape drive!

One would expect that after 30 years, having started in such a dominant position, MITS would control the entire high-technology world. Yet, somehow MITS lost this market dominance. Even the blue monolith of IBM lost to an outside player, an upstart named Apple.

More on the WSJ piece by my colleague Ryan Radia at CEI’s OpenMarket.org.

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