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The Washington Post’s Hayley Tsukayama says today fewer people are illegally downloading music as the availability of legitimate digital music is growing by leaps and bounds through new channels and subscription services.

It’s welcome news as more and more young people, including high school and college students, gain an awareness of the dangers of piracy and its threat to the US economy.

IPI’s 2007 publication, “The True Cost of Copyright Piracy to the US Economy” reported that widespread theft of copyright-protected products, including motion pictures, video games, sound recordings as well as business software, has cost the U.S. $58 billion in annual economic output and 373,375 jobs.

Several years ago I was at the doctor's office for an annual physical. I noted that this particular physical seemed more thorough than usual and included an electrocardiogram test. After the physical the nurse told me that the doctor wanted to talk to me and that she would be in shortly. I started doing the math and alarm bells went off...extra tests, I am getting older, doctor wants to chat with me. She came back and reported that everything looked fine, that the blood results would be back in a day or so, and then asked me two questions that at that moment I found peculiar—do I regularly wear my seat belt and how good do I feel about my life. Ok, alarm bells again!

As it turned out she was doing what she could to check my health as related to the two most likely causes of death for a 30 something male—car accidents and suicide. Men from 20 - 40 years old commit suicide as much as 3 to 4 times more often than women. Theories abound as to why, from broken relationships to work stress, but regardless the end result is an alarming, heart breaking, sad fact that is rarely discussed much less appropriately focused on.

Here are a couple of charts that hopefully will provide some perspective on the relative insignificance of the sequester cuts. First chart shows total federal spending for the next ten years. The blue bars are how much the federal government will continue to spend, and how much spending will continue to grow, even with the sequester cuts. All the other colors represent the sequester cuts. They're hard to see because they are INSIGNIFICANT.

Three cheers for Duquesne’s Julian Routh, a freshman journalism major. When it comes to criminal acts of intellectual property theft, Routh shows he gets it.

In his Duquesne Duke column, Routh writes that for those college students who illegally download music, the mindset is one of entitlement, calling the crime disrespectful to artists.

According to statistics from the Commerce Department, in 2012 Texas was the #1 exporting state in the country--and by a mile, too:

• Texas total exports for 2012 were $265.4bn compared to #2 California with $161.7bn

• Top destinations for Texas exports in 2012: Mexico ($94.8bn); Canada ($23.7bn); China ($10.3bn); Brazil ($10.0bn);  Netherlands ($9.5bn); South Korea ($7.8bn); Venezuela ($6.9bn); Singapore ($6.3); Colombia ($5.6bn); Japan ($4.7bn)

•  Texas' top exporting industry segments for 2012: Petroleum and Coal Product ($57.2bn); Chemicals ($47.0); Computer and Electronic Products ($45.2); Machinery, except electrical ($29.4); Transportation Equipment ($25.2); Electrical Equipment, Appliances and Components ($9.2); Fabricated Metal Products ($9.0); Primary Metal Manufacturing ($7.9); Food and Kindred Products ($5.4);  Oil and Gas ($5.3); Plastics and Rubber Products ($4.3); Agricultural Products ($4.3)  

Continuing with reflections on the Consumer Electronic Show policy track, one of the several panels was titled "Fighting the Patent Trolls." The assumption leading to the panel name, is that there are such things as patent trolls and that they are the problem. Both assumptions should be challenged.

Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show, several of the policy track panels discussed copyright but one panel focused on it, a panel titled "Beyond SOPA: Creating a Pro-innovation, Pro-artist Copyright Policy." Unfortunately the panel was very short on discussion as to how to create a pro-artist copyright policy. That discussion could have been quite insightful and thought provoking

I was honored to be the speaker tonight for the Flower Mound Area Republican Club's January meeting. The major topic was that it's relatively easy to balance the budget simply by getting spending modestly under control. 

I had prepared two PowerPoint slides to help illustrate the points, but due to a miscommunication I wasn't able to slow the slides. So here they are.

Good for Jon Stewart to see the insanity in Paul Krugman's $1 trillion magic coin idea.

The story is here from Politico.

As we've written, the idea is terrible economics and terrible politics, but that's par for the course with Krugman.

Can't you just picture a scene in the movie "Idiocracy" where President Camacho fires his automatic rifle into the sky and announces "I have a new plan that's going to fix everything! We're going to mint up some $1 trillion coins and that's going to fix EVERYTHING!"

The 2013 AT&T Developer Summit is underway in Las Vegas today. One of the many sessions hosted by AT&T, which are aimed at developers who are developing products, apps mainly, for use on their platform, was about mHealth, a sub-part of health technology.

Mobile health is an exciting area for many reasons but not the least is the huge potential for better outcomes for patients and opportunities for industry.

I headed out for the Consumer Electronics Show (http://www.cesweb.org/) on Sunday morning full of anticipation, hopeful of seeing all the latest electronic gadgets and must have's for 2013. Having been involved in many capacities in technology, communications, and intellectual property policy for nearly 20 years, my head always start swimming in early January spurred by CES, which may explain why even as I was headed to the show I came across a policy lesson about intellectual property.

Ever since passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011, most people have assumed that, eventually, some sort of deal would get done. Both sides have something to lose, the thinking went, so both sides will eventually compromise to spare the country from going over the fiscal cliff.

And everyone also assumed that, while the outcome of the election would tilt the balance of power, still both sides had something to lose, so a deal would get done.

And that makes sense, if you assume both sides have something to lose.

But what if, even before the election, one side thought it did NOT have much to lose? What if, in fact, one side thought it had almost nothing to lose and much to gain, and the outcome of the election simply confirmed this calculation? What then?

I think it's true that the election gives no one a mandate--that it was not a sweeping victory for a particular set of policies. But it's a tough day for those of us who thought the policy deficiencies of the past four years were obvious. Clearly, we have work to do, and lessons to learn.

Our principles are not wrong, or insufficient for today's challenges, but we have clearly not sufficiently persuaded the American people how those principles directly benefit them in their daily lives.

We have to convince the American people that freedom is better for them than Big Government. We have to provide support and analysis for our allies in Congress, and we have to work to strengthen their resolve and to help them navigate some difficult policy problems.