Discourse.net

This Begins to Explain the Voting on Resolution 1151

The UK’s Daily Telegraph reports Bush gives in to UN over cash for reconstruction. There’s slightly less to this story than the headline suggests as it appears from the text that the UN will get supervision over new, non-US Iraq aid, not over US aid. Still, if there were another secret concession out there somewhere it might begin to explain how the US got all those votes in favor of Security Council Resolution 1151.

The Jeb Bush-Arnold Schwarzenegger Connection

The Forida Blog asks (and answers) a real good question, one which will be of particular interest to Californians and to polticial junkies everywhere, “Who is Donna Arduin? And how is it she’s advising Arnold Schwarzenegger while on Florida’s payroll?”.

Earlier Orlando Sentinel coverage (also via the Florida Blog) contains this jem:

Those who know Arduin predict Californians will soon be handed a conservative diet of program cuts, the use of one-time tax dollars to pay for recurring state services, the privatizing of state work, and tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

Some creative math might also be thrown in to help balance the books, as well as a few clashes with lawmakers, observers said.

So, would that be Bush-Schwarzenegger, or Schwarzenegger-Bush in ‘08?

Actually, if I had to bet, I’d say Schwarzenegger goes the way of Jesse Ventura.

Why We Don't Have A Better Press Corps (Part I)

Since Brad has been so kind as to mention this very young blog as a candidate for his project to subvert the dominant internet link hierarchy, (and what better candidate given my BlogShares market share of either 0.00109649638077873 % or 0.00441336872434729 %!) it’s time to dust off and commit to finishing my post on Brad’s long-running and no doubt never-ending series on ‘Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps?’ (See, e.g., Part CCCCLXXVI). My thoughts are also influenced by a steady diet of the incomparable Daily Howler.

On and off I’ve been thinking a lot about the press question, maybe because I used to love reading the newspaper, maybe because reporting was one of the careers I (very) briefly considered while in college. I was an active student journalist, news editor of the campus paper, and both my mother and brother are journalists. I agree that the state of mass media reporting is terrible—although it bears mention that specialty journalism is flourishing. Not only is the Economist selling well, but so are a plethora of smart high-price, low-circulation publications like the National Journal.

The problem or problems is with the mass media. What explains the cowardice of major newspapers, their focus on the trivial at the expense of the significant, their weird idea that one has to give ‘both sides’ even if one is demonstrably false and believed by almost no one, and their failure to communicate (to understand?) basic social scientific concepts?

The changes in Big Newspapers seem to me to be driven by the unfortunate coincidence of four factors: economic, sociological, technical and ideological. I’ll address the first the two today and the other two in Part Two, which I’ll put up Real Soon Now™.

[As to what’s wrong with TV I have nothing to offer that hasn’t been said often before (partisan ownership, licensing rules that entrench owners and fail to protect the public, the economics of cable access, the ‘MTV’ approach to soundbite reporting, and so on and so on) , and am in any case handicapped as a TV commentator by my failure to own one.]

Economics. Print newspapers are as a class a slowly shrinking business, although there remain substantial profits for the last paper standing in a big market. There are many fewer newspapers than there used to be, and far, far more owned by newspaper chains. Absentee owners with stockholders demand high profits. The Miami Herald, for example, recently had to trim its staff in order to attain the profit target imposed by Knight Ridder. (And it has recently been redesigned to look like a USA Today McPaper, but that’s another issue.)

Even more significantly, there are now almost no cities with two serious daily newspapers. That means fewer newspaper wars, less concern about being “scooped,” and generally a loss of the competitive dynamic that kept news reporting sharp and aggressive. Newspapers now see their competition as TV (and maybe radio). But while these may be fierce competitors for consumer attention, they are rarely competition for news gathering — indeed many TV stations take their agendas from the morning papers.

To the extent that the market for the attention of news consumers could be modeled as Downsian and linear, ranging from serious to fluff (with TV very much on the fluff end of the spectrum), it’s not surprising that in the absence of serious print competition, many newspapers have gravitated to the fluffier end of the news provision spectrum. So long as they are a little meatier than the TV, the incentive is to converge towards TV, as the newspapers keep everyone to the meatier side of the spectrum, and reducing poaching from TV.

(As I’ll discuss in Part 2, the lack of rivals also has an ideological effect, in that it makes some papers think they have an extra duty to avoid taking sides—or play everthing down the middle—since they are the only game in town.)

Sociology. In Ye Olde Days, many newspaper reporters were in effect the intellectuals of the working classes. Most reporters didn’t have a college education. The job did not pay that well. While undoubtedly frequently chummy with some of the power brokers of the day, the press nonetheless identified with readers who were not rich, not powerful, and not necessarily well-educated. The print press today is a profession. The Fourth Estate not only went to college, it went to better colleges than many politicians — or, worse, went to college with the politicians. The print press gets a professional’s salary. The print press not only doesn’t identify with working people, it often identifies with the politicians, or at least some of them.

This, I think, partly explains why the print press will pile on to a “scandal” when someone casts the first stone but remians curiously reluctant to say, or even suggest, that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to policy issues. Note the word “partly”—

(What the zeitgeist of the TV press is, is harder to say. The salary variance is greater, with some salaries in the showbiz range. At its best it’s still journalism, but at its worst it’s something lower than the Yellow Press of yore. Indeed, it’s all too easy to imagine that the comparison between Fox News (and CNN’s) handlilng of the Iraq conflict and the treatment of the sinking—if sinking it was—of the Maine, may become a historian’s set-piece.)

In Part Two, I’ll discuss the technology of news management, the press’s misguided definition of “news”. I hope to conclude with some thoughts about What Can Be Done — if I can find the right note between despair and Utopianism
33

Children Who Blog

Amazingly, Google has no entries as of yet for “children who blog”. There are, however, several items on “kids who blog,” including this Christian Science Monitor item. Most of them seem to be about teenagers, especially girls.

I mention this, because all of a sudden I now have two kids who blog. It was Elder Son (age 10) who suggested he could have one at something.discourse.net. I didn’t like the idea of a blog open to the world, so we compromised on one that will be served from a different second-level domain name, and is password-protected so that only family members can read it. Fortunately my hosting plan allows me to serve several domains for the same price, and I had an underused one hanging around. Younger Son (age 7), who perhaps already has a keener sense about the dangers in the world (he has, after all, experience of dealing with Elder Son…), enthusiastically agreed with this idea.

So now the kids have an online newspaper they can update when they like, and we have an easy way to share digital pictures with a far-flung family. And the non-blogging relatives can send messages to the kids by posting comments. Don’t know if it will last as an enthusiasm, but if it does it should be fun.

IP Justice Says that FTAA Got Infected With Lousy IP Rules

I generally avoid trade law and trade treaties, on the grounds that life is too short. The way trade law is going, however, I may have to make some exceptions. I’ve already had to read up on the dispute settlement rules in major trade treaties to teach International Law, which I’m doing for the first time this year.

Now, IP Justice, a civil liberties group, has just published FTAA: A Threat to Freedom and Free Trade. In it they analyze the Intellectual Property parts of the draft Free Trade Area of the Americas Treaty which is intended to go into effect in 2005. Their summary is scary enough that I think I’ll have to go read the full agreement and see if it is as bad as they say. [Note: Headline corrected.]

The FTAA seeks to unite the 34 democracies in the Western Hemisphere (including the US) to a single trade agreement akin to NAFTA. Parts of the treaty take an aggressive position on harmonization issues—and these are among the controversial parts.

According to IP Justice’s summary, the draft intellectual property rights chapter in the FTAA Agreement will expand criminal procedures and penalties against intellectual property infringements throughout the Americas. One proposal in Article 4.1, they say, would make Internet music swapping a felony throughout the Western Hemisphere in 2005.

Worse, apparently the proposed agreement forbids consumers from bypassing technical restrictions on their own CDs, DVDs and other property, similar to the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). That would ‘lock-in’ the DMCA — just at a time when proposals to repeal part of it are gathering some steam in US Congress.

Ironcially, for a “free trade” agreement, the FTAA would enshrine price discrimination by making illegal to bypass trade barriers such as DVD region code restrictions.

Other frightening stuff in the IP Justice summary:

The draft treaty also imposes new definitions for “fair use” and “personal use,” curtailing traditional fair use and personal use rights to a single copy and only under limited circumstances. This prevents consumers from backing-up their media collections, using their media in new and innovative ways, and accessing media for educational and non-commercial purposes.

Another clause would require all countries to amend their copyright laws to extend copyright’s term to at least 70 years after the life of the author, essentially forcing the new US standard on all other 33 countries in the hemisphere. Although forbidden by the US Constitution, FTAA’s copyright section would allow companies to copyright facts and scientific data.

Another provision requires all domain name trademark disputes to be decided by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private and unaccountable organization that is ill equipped to determine the limits of freedom of expression rights or the scope of intellectual property rights. Americans would no longer have access to their local public courts to adjudicate rights over their Internet domain names. [I really got to check this out — that sounds dubious — as the current and highly flawed ICANN procedure provides for subsequent court actions….]

“The FTAA Treaty’s IP chapter reads like a ‘wish list’ for RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft lobbyists,” said IP Justice Executive Director Robin Gross. “Rather than promote competition and creativity, it is bloated with provisions that create monopolies over information and media devices,” stated the intellectual property attorney.

The next round of FTAA Treaty negotiations will be here in Miami from November 16-21, 2003. Looks like I better read it by then….

The Greatest UCC Cartoons in the History of the World

My colleague William H. Widen is not your typical law professor. For one thing he practiced commercial and corporate law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore from 1984 to 2001, spending more than a decade of that time as a partner. Most law professors have some practice experience, but few have as much as that. For another thing, he has a wicked taste in movies, and wild taste in aphorisms (is it true that “business law is about as complicated as Donkey Kong”?). And did I mention he’s pretty slick at programming interesting web sites on the Uniform Commercial Code? Including one that invites students to play a game he designed called Ultimate Commercial Code! [Admittedly there he has the advantage of being married to serious techie.] And, to top it off, he’s fascinated by the Uniform Commercial Code, a subject most law professors do not necessarily find scintillating. In fact, he’s so fascinated that it’s almost contagious.

Then there are his cartoons, “Tales From The Code.” I think it’s safe to call these the Greatest UCC Cartoons in the History of the World, if only because they are probably the only Uniform Commercial Code cartoons in the history of the world. But if there was another UCC cartoon or two, these are funnier. Start with Episode One. Beware, though. You might learn something.