February 18, 2008

OPINION DAILY

File sharing or stealing?

A few days ago I came across an Op-Ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate party — a pro-business party that's akin to this country's Libertarians (except in Sweden they're more than just a fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid's new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn't actually theft. Here's an excerpt:

In "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism", the economist and Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek explains the difference between conventional property rights and copyright. While the supply of material resources is limited by nature, the supply of an immaterial good [is] unlimited, unless the government limits the supply by law. A later Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, describes copyright as a monopoly that decreases supply to a level below the optimal level. Copyright and the regulations that follow from it should, according to Friedman, be described primarily as a limitation of free speech.

Hurricane Dean's march toward the Gulf Coast couldn't have provided a more ironic backdrop for Space Shuttle Endeavour's early touchdown Tuesday afternoon. Endeavour, originally scheduled to return to Earth today, landed in Florida a day early in anticipation of Dean's possible landfall over Houston, where NASA's Johnson Space Center handles the orbiter's reentry into the atmosphere. In the event of a Houston landfall, NASA would have had to close the space center for the storm's duration.

August 21, 2007

Opinion Daily

July 3, 2007

OPINION DAILY

Lessons from the Cold River

The annals of military history are notably free of heroic deeds executed by the Lebanese armed forces. The tiny republic boasts three military branches: an army that recently ended its mass-conscription policy, a navy without any ships and an air force which has not fielded an airworthy fighter plane in more than 20 years. Legendary as a cohort of disgruntled enlisted people and pampered, barely competent officers, Lebanon's regular fighting force was the butt of a joke from the early history of Israel: When forced to fight all the Arab countries at once, the story went, the Israelis would dispatch their marching band to handle Lebanon. (This joke seemed to come true in Israel's war against Hezbollah last summer, during which the regular army offered no real resistance.) The token armed forces held a kind of negative symbolic value as the brand of a fractured society and a dysfunctional government of a state unable even to control the use of violence within its own borders.

June 27, 2007

Thomas marches to his own tune

Sixteen years after he turned the tables on Anita Hill by telling a Senate committee that he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching," Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas remains a figure of fascination for journalists and amateur psychologists. The enigma that is Thomas the public persona is summed up in the title of a recent biography of the justice: "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas."

June 25, 2007

Opinion Daily

Sirius, XM and American values

Worried about the proposed merger between the XM and Sirius satellite radio services? So are more than 70 members of Congress, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America and the American Antitrust Institute, among other groups.

June 22, 2007

Ronald Brownstein: Red and blue in the black

Any illusions that cultural arguments won't divide the country again in 2008 were probably dispelled in the recent New Hampshire debates when all of the Democratic presidential candidates said they would allow gays to serve openly in the military and all of the Republicans said they would not.

June 21, 2007

Opinion Daily

Dead reporters and the information gap

FOR THE RECORD:

June 19, 2007

Opinion Daily

Semper Fidel

"I can tell you that he has recovered his fastball of 90 miles an hour," Hugo Chávez informed the world last week after meeting with Fidel Castro, adding that the Cuban president for life "has his uniform hanging near him and he's peeking at it, but he's still warming up his arm," and is "not yet ready to take the diamond."

June 14, 2007

Opinion Daily

Whitehouse takes Gonzales to the woodshed

Sheldon Whitehouse sounds like a character who would be played by Franklin Pangborn, the fussy second banana to W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Actually, Whitehouse is a freshman Democratic senator from Rhode Island who has been the breakout star of the Senate investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

June 11, 2007

Opinion Daily

Battle Royalty

Last week, top executives from four popular online radio services sent a letter to every member of Congress, warning that new royalty rates for online radio broadcasters "will cause immediate bankruptcy of the majority of the Internet radio industry" on July 15, the day they take effect.

June 8, 2007

Ronald Brownstein: Rematch for Clinton's split decisions

The most dramatic exchange in Sunday's Democratic presidential debate came at a moment when none of the candidates said a word. Asked by moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN whether they would seek to repeal former President Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, all eight candidates immediately raised their hands to indicate that they would.

June 7, 2007

Opinion Daily

Accommodating reality in Iraq

There are two schools of thought in Washington about how to make peace in Iraq: the Bush administration's, and almost everyone else's. With the war in its fifth year and the troop-surge strategy for the moment producing more U.S. casualties than progress, some have the humility to admit that their plans for fixing Iraq may not work.

June 5, 2007

OPINION DAILY

Portrait of the old man as a copyright miser

In the sweet science of early-21st-century struggles over intellectual property rights, the title fights tend to be fairly technology-rich. Court cases over network DVR, Viacom's continuing battle against Google, Microsoft's grudge match with the open-source community, George Lucas' accord with Star Wars mashup artists—that kind of thing. But every fight fan knows the undercards are where the really strange stuff happens, and you can still find old-fashioned battles involving such fanciful media as bound books and longhand letters.

May 31, 2007

Opinion Daily

We're all scandal-plagued attorneys general now

In an interview on Sunday's Meet the Press, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was pummeled by host Tim Russert about everything from his inconsistencies on Iraq to his professions of loyalty to both the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Perhaps the most embarrassing—yet also poignant—"Gotcha!" moment came when Russert pounced on Richardson's slowness to call for the resignation of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales.

May 29, 2007

Opinion Daily

The Mission manzanita, a hardy native shrub whose berries the Chumash used to make into juice, is one of many California chapparal plants that, in the words of the Catalina Conservancy, "require fire for optimal seed germination." When drought browns the hills, and the Santa Anas come tearing through the sky five months early, it's boom-time for our fire-dependent flora. "These plants," the Conservancy notes, "have very hard seed coats that are scarified by fire and thereby 'activated.'"

May 14, 2007

Opinion Daily

Opinion Daily

Keep your friends close

The United States has a problem: We're killing off our allies.