IS CHEAPER ALWAYS BETTER? MISUSING THE CONCEPT OF MARGINAL COST IN POLICY DISCUSSIONS
Solveig Singleton, "Is Cheaper Always Better? Misusing the Concept of Marginal Cost in Policy Discussions," July 24, 2008
The influence of economics on policy culture has generally been for the good, contributing to deregulation and the liberalization of policy around the world. [Read More]
EBAY'S ONLINE TRADEMARK VICTORY OVER TIFFANY
Solveig Singleton, "eBay's Online Trademark Victory Over Tiffany," DRM Watch, July 16, 2008, available at [DRM Watch]
A federal court opinion in an online trademark case could have interesting implications for websites' and online services' responsibilities toward their users' copyright infringements, including the use of filters that screen out unauthorized copyrighted works. The jewelry retailer Tiffany & Co. sued eBay, arguing that the online auction site did not do enough to prevent auctions of counterfeit Tiffany’s goods. [Read More]
REGULATORY POLICY
In ["What's Your Regulatory Policy?" TCS Daily, June 18, 2008,] CLI Adjunct Scholar Solveig Singleton says that troubled financial markets, concerns about network neutrality, and aggressive trustbusters are triggering new calls for government regulation. But, she argues, "Before embracing new regulatory panaceas, it would be wise to revisit the reasons why we rejected the old ones just a few years ago."
The article is reprinted at [TCS Daily].
ORPHAN WORKS
May 20, 2008
James DeLong argues in C/Net News (May 20, 2008) (Orphan Works: Half a loaf), that the pending bills are good, but that aggregators are going to need more leeway:
"These possibly-orphan, sort-of-orphan, and gray literature works simply cannot be made available if the digitizers are required to make one-by-one judgments and seek permission before copying. If they are to be retrieved in useful form, then sooner or later Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and some others must be permitted to digitize on a massive scale."
For a version with links go here.
NETWORK & PLATFORM COMPANIES
May 08, 2008
James DeLong's article "Avoiding a Tech Train Wreck," which looks at issues surrounding network and platform companies (e.g., Net Neutrality; Windows complements), is out in THE AMERICAN. The press release, which serves as an Executive Summary, is linked below.
Anyone interested in these issues (a taste acquired only by a select group), should find it interesting.
James V. DeLong, "Avoiding a Tech Train Wreck," THE AMERICAN, May/June 2008
For a version with hyperlinks: "Avoiding a Tech Train Wreck" [LINKED VERSION]
Press Release
REGULATORS AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
April 14, 2008
By: James V. DeLong, VP & Senior Analyst, Convergence Law Institute. (Mr. DeLong is a former regulator, administrative law scholar, and Research Director of the Administrative Conference of the United States.)
The boiling debate over regulation of the financial system raises a series of difficult, interesting, and unusual issues. As Donald Rumsfeld would put it, there are the knowns, the known unknows, and the unknown unknows, and anyone who claims to grasp the totality is a true genius or absolutely mad, probably the latter.
For those who are neither, here are some of the factors at work. [Read More]
NETWORK NEUTRALITY & TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
Net Neutrality is the Terminator of telecom - no matter now many hits it takes, it gets up and keeps coming at you. The latest round is the FCC decision, in response to petitions from NN advocates, to investigate Comcast's network management practices concerning treatment of P2P. Last week, Comcast agreed to work with BitTorrent on the issue, and it is not clear whether the FCC probe will continue.
The Real Target of the petitions is probably not the ISPs; no sensible person thinks that these should not be allowed to prioritize traffic that is most affected by delays. Real-time surgery must get preference over downloading the latest American Idol. The real target looks to be the content companies. The "information wants to be free" crowd wants to get the ISPs, backed by the FCC, to foreswear any desire or power to filter for pirated content. The content companies seem oblivious, however - the MPAA praised the Comcast/BitTorrent deal, even though Comcast says it will not discriminate against P2P, with no distinction as to the nature of the content, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation took a victory lap.
FINANCIAL REGULATION
The Treasury Department issued its Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure, the latest step in its Capital Markets Competitiveness review. Secretary Paulson characterized it as "aspirational" - an attempt at a clean-sheet redesign - as representing "a regulatory model based on objectives, to more closerly link the regulatory structure to the reasons why we regulate."
Press reaction was that nothing can possibly happen this year, and that the reform of financial regulation will be a multi-year row. It is hard to tell though; hell hath no fury like a Congress that feels compelled to do something, anything, as recent experience with Sarbanes Oxley and the reorganization of intelligence agencies illustrates.
It is interesting to puzzle about how the current efforts will interact with an important, and oddly unremarked, element of the tech revolution: the need to develop institutional arrangements that effectively wed the intellectual capital of the creative classes to the money capital of the financiers. This effort is suffering some setbacks:
+ The stock-options-expense issue was lost five years ago, and it won't be long before we see proposals to tax stock options as income at the time of issuance, which would be a severe blow to their use.
+ The move to increase taxes on private equity will certainly revive after the election.
+ Some patent reform proposals seem designed to make life harder for innovators, and easier for market incumbents.
+ Tech companies, investors, and foreign governments fear that the rising tide of the U.S. protectionism is spilling over into decisions by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and damming up important founts of risk capital.
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