Saturday, June 11, 2005
Yglesias and Woolsey
Got annoyed with an Yglesias post today. Seems that he doesn’t much trust James Woolsey. Which is fine, except that he tried to smear him with the label:
James “the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the ‘fascists’ of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda” Woolsey?
Not that Woolsey needs me to defend him, but I had to ask:
I’m sorry, but which of these three groups do you believe is not fighting us? Or is it simply that though they would like to fight us, they are too insignificant to warrant our attention? Perhaps we should simply “contain” them to keep their atrocities local? After all, as long as they do nothing more than oppress Muslims and murder religious minorities (or an occasionally insufficiently pious Muslim), what’s it to us?
I don’t really expect an answer.
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Friday, June 03, 2005
Patent Reform
Yglesias piques my interest yet again! Today he wrote a brief piece about patent reform. I added my own two cents:
It’s tough to know how to best motivate innovation. Many recent observers have concluded that our current patent system is too strong. If that’s true, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Not too long ago, the general consensus was that our patent system was too weak, and that it was hurting our competitiveness internationally. In the late ‘70s, Jimmy Carter set up a Domestic Policy Review committee to find the sources of our national malaise. One of its key recommendations was that we needed to strengthen our patent system. The Carter Justice Department ran with the idea, and in one of the few clean handoffs, the Reagan Justice Department finished the job.
That was 25 years ago. We need to fix the system again, perhaps in fundamental ways. The best bet would be to keep it where it is--with the ideological divide running orthogonal to partisan affiliation. While I don’t deny the benefits that the pharmaceutical industry enjoys under both the patent system and several of Bush’s domestic policies, I see this parallel as essentially coincidental.
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Thursday, June 02, 2005
The Greatest Country
I found another of Yglesias’s posts just screaming for a comment. He titled it with the provocative quesry, Which is the Greatest Country of All? In return, I asked Who Fits?
I had a conversation with a friend this afternoon. I have just returned from Portugal, he from Italy. I said that the more time that I spend abroad, the stronger my feeling that we’ve got something unique going in this country. He said that time abroad reminds him of how sick he’s getting of Americans--and how much he prefers Europeans.
Which of us is more representative of the Democratic intelligentsia? I’d like to think that I am, but I don’t. I suspect that he speaks for many affluent, educated, Democrats, completely apalled at Bush’s reelection, who prefer to seek the company of “sensible” Europeans. Personally, I’ve got my problems with Bush, but I’ve seen worse. Chirac and Schroeder come immediately to mind.
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Baby Steps into the Blogosphere
A colleague sent me a link to a blog called ”TPM Cafe,” which apparently grew out of something called the “Talking Points Memo,” and a suggestion that I “try to hook up with these guys.”
More specifically, he linked me into Matt Yglesias‘s post called ”Infopolitics as Metaphor and Reality.” Yglesias apparently questions whether or not the “information age” is real, or simply a useful metaphor:
[I]n all these contexts, “the information age” almost always serves as a kind of metaphor for the notion that the public sector ought to become more flexible, more consumer-oriented, and so forth. . . . All that’s fine as far as it goes (except when, as in the case of Klein’s enthusiasm for privatization it’s not fine), but it leaves what I think is a pretty noteworthy blank spot—the literal politics and policy of the information age. There’s a broad set of issues related to intellectual property law, telecommunications policy, the dispensation of the radio spectrum, and so forth that are actually about the information age where the policies we have nowadays are unsatisfactory and where mainstream liberal figures have tended not to show much leadership.
As a devout believer in the reality of the information age, I felt compelled to comment. And so, today I made my first official blog posting (my previous significant contributions to on-line discourse all having occurred before blogs were blogs), under the title ”Towards Coherence in Infopolitics”:
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The Education of a Baby Blogger
It occurs to me that as the proud owner of a new website and blog, I should spend a bit of time trying to understand this new phenomenon of blogging. I confess that I’ve fallen behind. Most of my work on Digital Phoenix took place before blogging was much of a phenomenon. I hate feeling behind the curve on an important information sector development, but keeping up to speed is a full-time job. So I’m going to spend the next month learning what’s going on.
more...
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Sunday, December 07, 2003
Combating Anti-Americanism
Jean-François Revel’s recent book, Anti-Americanism, put a terrifying label on a phenomenon that we can no longer ignore. Anti-Americanism has transcended mere political opposition abroad to emerge as a full-blown hate movement. We need to understand that movement if we’re going to defeat it.
Anti-Americanism is coming to bear an eerie resemblance to anti-Semitism, (or anti-Zionism, as it is known in fashionable circles). Anti-Americans blame the U.S. for supporting or opposing authoritarian regimes, for investing or failing to invest in developing countries, for lowering or raising trade barriers, and for intervening or failing to intervene in crisis zones. Anti-Semites have long blamed the Jews for being submissive and assertive, communists and capitalists, stateless people and people committed to building a state. The history of anti-Semitism demonstrates the danger of ignoring such hypocrisy simply because its internal inconsistencies render it absurd.
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Saturday, February 01, 2003
Cri de Coeur
I’m a liberal. I’m proud. I’m angry. And I want my good name back.
Liberalism is a bold and noble pursuit: it seeks to liberate, to liberalize, and to spread the ideals of liberal democracy. True liberals yearn for a world in which every person feels secure enough to take calculated risks, is well enough informed to appreciate the consequences of those risks, and is free enough to act upon his or her own choices. In our heyday, we offered depressed American workers a new deal, war-ravaged Western Europeans a recovery plan, repressed Eastern Europeans a declaration of their human rights, and we declared war on poverty. We made freedom work. We made markets work. We made tolerance and inclusiveness work. We expanded our liberal society from white, male landowners to enfranchise the landless and the poor. We recognized the equality of all people, regardless of faith, race, gender, or sexual orientation. We integrated polyglot huddled masses into a coherent civic entity. We brought liberty and stability to long-warring European and Asian tribes. And though each of these expansions cost substantial money, time, effort, and blood, our gains always exceeded our costs by a vast amount.
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Promoting Innovation in the Software Field:
A First Principles Approach to Intellectual Property Reform
Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law, 8:1: 75-156, Winter, 2002
This article started life as a paper that I wrote for a 1999 seminar on antitrust and intellectual property, but really came to life only in 2000. The article introduced a fundamental—and somewhat iconoclastic—belief, namely that everything that we learned about software markets during the Microsoft trial was an inevitable consequence of the intellectual property rights that we grant on software.
Though I have subsequently refined this argument elsewhere, this article remains the most formal treatment that I have given it to date. The article itself is split into two parts. The first presents a conceptual model for assessing the relative strength of competing IP regimes, for understanding their relative costs and benefits, and for gravitating towards a societally optimal regime. The second considers the software industry as a case study, and demonstrates the inevitability (and thus the predictability) of Microsoft’s behavior.
I understand that my model has been well received and built upon elsewhere, both in the literature and in classroom exercises.
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