Blog

Our libertarian friends over at the Mercatus Center have set up a website that bashes the movie industry because it doesn’t release movies according to the schedule that the Mercatus Center thinks it should.

At least, that is the clear implication of the site.

What they do at the site is compare the most pirated movies for a particular week with the legal streaming availability of those same movies. Which isn’t even relevant, despite what Tim Lee thinks.

It IS interesting that TorrentFreak brazenly publishes a list of the most pirated movies. That’s pretty in-your-face behavior, considering that piracy is illegal. As you might guess, the most pirated movies are the most recent successful movies.

But it is utterly irrelevant whether or not a pirated movie is available for streaming. That’s because the release schedule and business plan for the movie is entirely the business of whoever owns the movie, and not anyone else. That’s an implication of property rights that libertarians ought to understand. You and your pirate friends do not get to decide what happens to my property.

My favorite tie is the London School of Economics tie. It’s purple, and my wife likes purple. Plus it’s got black in it, and I like black. No, I didn’t attend the school, but their tie is cool and I wear it.

I know it probably offends LSE grads that someone who didn’t attend the school wears the tie, but I’m about to offend LSE grads with this blog post far more than I do when I wear their tie.

That’s because the LSE dropped a big plop of barbecue sauce on their ties recently. Or, as I put it more colorfully in the title, they wet themselves.

If an institution wants a reputation for credibility and serious analysis, they shouldn’t put out a report like the LSE did in a week or so ago, “Copyright & Creation: A Case for Promoting Inclusive Online Sharing” [PDF].

The paper is yet another iteration in an effort by academics and others not involved in the music industry to define how the music industry should operate in the digital age, which most commonly and most emphatically involves not enforcing copyright. And, lately, in a more focused theme, that graduated response mechanisms should not be implemented.

The latest “wisdom” about the government shutdown is that the impasse is making the U.S. a laughing stock around the world. If there is any country laughing at the U.S., it’s either a hypocrite or it hasn’t looked at its own financial situation—or that of many other countries. 

Late yesterday, after House leaders said that their strategy will be to send separate appropriations bills to the Senate, President Obama derided the strategy as a "piecemeal approach" that he would veto as inadequate. Instead, he demanded a "clean CR" (continuing resolution) to fund the federal government.

This is truly stunning. The "piecemeal approach" President Obama dissed is regular order in Congress. The way Congress is supposed to operate is for thirteen separate appropriations bills to be debated, passed, and sent on to the other body. These thirteen separate bills fund the various departments of the federal government.

The most fundamental question in economics is not about math: It’s about philosophy and morality. And how you answer the question takes you down a path that is not only economic, but also philosophical and moral.

(Please bear with this brief economics discussion)

So what is this question? Whether the general public benefits from private ownership (and control) of capital.

Marx, of course, famously answered this “No” —the public does NOT benefit from private ownership of capital.  In fact Marx, who coined the term “capitalism,” said that private ownership of capital leads to abuse of the public because capitalists use control of their capital to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.  In this worldview, if private ownership of capital harms the public, it’s private ownership that is immoral, and theft becomes a moral, even heroic act. So Marxism does away with private ownership and control of capital and turns it over to the general public, in the assumption that the general public will better deploy capital in its own best interests.

According to a study released today by the European Patent Office (EPO), one-in-three jobs in the EU is dependent on the IP-intensive industries.

It’s a 144-page study, available here as a PDF. The press release is available here.

Carried out jointly by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) acting through the EU Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights and the European Patent Office (EPO), the study finds that about 40% of total economic activity in the EU (some €4.7 trillion annually) is generated by IPR-intensive industries, and approximately 35% of all employment in the EU (77 million jobs) stems from such industries that have a higher than average use of IP rights. The report also finds that average remuneration in IPR-intensive industries is more than 40% higher than in other industries. 

Of course, this is no great surprise to those of us who understand that the modern, knowledge-based economies of the developed nations are very much dependent on their ability to imagine, create, and innovate, and then crucially to monetize those creations into economic activity.

And it’s completely consistent with what has been found by others who did similar such research with an honest look at the data, as opposed to those who set out intentionally to argue against IP protection.

Now, of course, we await the study by CCIA that claims that twelve-in-three jobs in the EU are dependent on fair use.

Admit it, we’ve all done it—This morning I was doing a web search on my own name. Normally there are no surprises, but that’s kinda why we do it, right? To see if there are any surprises? And when you have a last name like mine, odds are when you do a web search on your name, it’s you that comes up, not 500 other people with the same name.

Anyway, a surprise came up, and it was an unpleasant one: I found that a website called DocStoc.com is selling pirated copies of a book I wrote some years ago. You can buy copies of all sorts of pirated books on DocStoc, it seems.

This year’s International Property Rights Index, a project of the Property Rights Alliance, ranks the U.S. #17 for the protection of both physical and intellectual property.

The US score is thanks in part to its strong intellectual property protection system, and ranked second only to Finland’s IPR structure (which is also #1 on the overall property rights list.)

So this morning I see news of a release of a paper from a law professor in Australia who finds that graduated response enforcement, such as “three strikes” policies, doesn’t work.

And that’s as far as almost anyone goes these days in our information overload society. You see a subject line in an email that says graduated response doesn’t work according to a new study, and you tuck that little detail away in your mind. “I remember reading somewhere that graduated response doesn’t work” the little voice in your head will say 18 months from now when the topic comes up in a discussion somewhere.

And then Mike Masnick over at TechDirt and Tim Lee over at the Washington Post will gleefully blog that, according to this new study, graduated response doesn’t work. The echo chamber does it’s work. And that’s that.

So I decided to actually go to the trouble of reading the study. And not only that, but also reading a few other things the author has written, look into some of the author’s affiliations and assumptions, etc.  It takes time, of course. But I do these things as a service to you.

The new unemployment numbers are out and the best we can say is, well, actually there isn’t much good we can say. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 169,000 jobs last month, but that’s about 10,000 lower than may economists were predicting.

Unemployment fell from 7.4 percent to 7.3 percent, which looks god initially, but that’s because so many more Americans quit looking for work.

When President George W. Bush took America into Iraq to invade the country, overthrow its government and install a new one more to our liking, he provoked a major crisis on the center-right regarding foreign policy; i.e., what should be our governing principles for such military intervention. Bush’s policies were, undeniably, a departure from any recent past calculus by Republican presidents.

[It’s important to note that Bush’s attack on Afghanistan did not cause consternation on the Right. We were attacked by a foe being provided safe harbor and resources by Afghanistan. All of the wealth and treasure that should have been directed at the Taliban and al-Queda in Afghanistan were misdirected at Iraq in the opinions of many conservatives.]

Conservatives like principles by which to make our decisions. We’re uncomfortable making emotional decisions, and we’re uncomfortable simply defending whatever “our guy in the White House” wants to do or, for that matter, we’re uncomfortable simply opposing whatever “their guy in the White House” wants to do. We value principles, intellectual consistency, and putting country above party. We know that, ultimately, military involvement overseas is always going to be a judgment call, but we want to feel good about how the judgment was made.

But such principles have been hard to come by in recent practice. For better or worse, the crisis in Syria and the opportunity for congressional debate has created a chance for conservatives to think through how such decisions ought to be made.

The Dallas Fed put out a very interesting paper (PDF) in July in which they try to quantify the damage done by the 2007-09 financial crisis. Don’t go looking to this paper to find anything about the “cause” or “roots” of the crisis, or how to get out of it, or whether the right policies were followed, etc. No, they’re just trying to quantify the costs to the economy, which is valid and interesting in itself.

They come up with some astonishingly large numbers. Without going into enormous detail here (you can read the paper yourself if you have an appetite for enormous detail), they find that the cost of the financial crisis is at least 40-90% of a full year’s (2007) economic output for the United States. I say “at least” because, after they have figured in a few other factors they believe are valid, they conclude that “what the U.S. gave up as a result of the crisis is likely greater than the value of one year’s output.”

That’s between $6 trillion and $14 trillion lost, or the equivalent of $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household. Now it seems big.

Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza writes how a promised satellite patent office for tech giant Silicon Valley—the top region in the world producing patents—is being denied thanks to sequestration cuts, despite the fact that patent offices are funded through patent fees, not taxpayer dollars.

It’s time once again for us to delve into the logical fallacies of Mike Masnick. Previously, we dealt with Mike committing the bifurcation fallacy. In today’s installment, it’s Mike committing the logical fallacy of begging the question.

Mike has often broadly asserted that one of the many sins of copyright is that it is used to facilitate censorship. So anytime any proponent of copyright points out how copyright facilitates the creation and distribution of speech, and thus is a friend of free speech and the First Amendment, Mike is quick to retort something like “How can anyone claim with a straight face that copyright supports the First Amendment when it is so often used for censorship!”

Like he did here, for instance.

Perhaps no other area of innovation is more critical to protect than pharmaceuticals and medical technology. But a piece today in Forbes by Eli Lilly's CEO discusses how a trend in Canadian courts may be threatening drug innovation by invalidating therapies and medicines already in use by patients on a wide scale.

Lechleiter writes:

“Canadian courts have arbitrarily created – and retroactively applied – a standard for what is ‘useful’ under Canadian law. Applying the ‘Promise of the Patent Doctrine,’ the courts have set a standard found in no other developed country, and one that is more or less impossible for an innovative pharmaceutical company to consistently meet.”