Letter to the Dean of U. of Chicago Law School

I felt it appropriate to make sure that Mr. Epstein's employer be aware of the questionable quality of his recent work, and any stigmatization it may have created. It would not be fair to the University of Chicago School, if Mr. Epstein was not aware of how his opinion reflects upon his employer.

This is not without consideration, as I have considered U. of C. Law School for an LL.M. and as a potential subsequent employer. Mr. Epstein's presence, in the capacity of his published article, deters such a choice.

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Dear Mr. Levmore:

You should be aware that Professor Epstein has written an embarassingly flawed
article, published here:

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/78d9812a-2386-11d9-aee5-00000e2511c8.html

The absurdity of the article is reflected in its convoluted conclusions, and
contrast with clear rebuttals on the page and elsewhere, in particular here:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041028000105896

Indeed, the esteemed Professor Lawrence Lessig felt it only necessary to
summarize the offensively flawed article in one line:

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002244.shtml

The quality of this publication reflects very poorly on the University of
Chicago, and in particular your Law School. That a longstanding and
distinguished professor could produce something as questionable, offensive,
and absurd necessitates an uneasy speculation about the choices and
productions of the faculty.

The article demonstrates an absence of understanding of basic legal
principles, such as the difference between a copyright license and a
contract. A capacity to produce this nonsense brings the quality of his prior
and forthcoming publications into question.

I hope more care will be taken by your faculty in future publications to not
hold themselves out as experts in areas where they are clearly incompetent.

Sincerely,

Nortelish Criminals

When Nortel crashed, it took with it a vast array of stock portfolios, from pensions through soon-to-be retirees. The Canadian economy was momentarily stunned, and tens of thousands collectively lost millions of dollars. There has been surprisingly little analysis of what happened. Certainly the dot-com boom contributed, but is it the reason that the multitudes were robbed of their trust, their investments, and in many cases their retirement? Was there some other, fundamental reason?

Someone who takes $20 from your wallet without your permission, or fraudulently uses your credit card for $500 which is typically insured and reimbursed by the credit card corporation, or an assailant who causees you physical harm, is often described as a crimnal. These crimes are prohibited by a strict legal enforcement regime, including police, lawyers, judges, and prisons. Our country pays millions every year preventing these criminal activities that cause mediocre to medium levels of harm. It is a valuable service in prevention, to be sure. But they do little to prevent massive frauds on Society.

The criminal prevention regime does not work so well for the stock market. If it isn't a blatant violation of the principles, it is very difficult to prosecute people who either through negligence and willful blindness, or with intent and knowledge, cause harm to millions. The crimes I cited result in mediocre harm to individuals, but what happens at the stock market level, such as in the case of Nortel, results in harm to millions. Someone can take $20 and go to jail, an adequate deterrent. A corporate executive can pollute rivers, lobby against human rights, and screw shareholders over for personal gain, with virtual legal immunity. Worse, by virtue of the economic value in the executives decisions, he will be monetarily rewarded, giving him access to the best lawyers.

The corporate regime we have created puts harm into a new category, where it is cast upon the multitudes, the deterrence is a fraction of those necessary, and the enforcement is simply incapable of accommodating.

350 tonnes stolen

According to this CBC Report, 350 tonnes of explosives were stolen in Iraq. A mere 5 lbs of plastic explosives, a for which the stolen goods are an essential ingredient, could destroy a dozen airliners.

If one pound of plastic explosive could be made from a pound of the stolen explosive, then depending on whether it's a metric, long, or short ton, the Iraqis stole,

• 771,618 lbs,
• 784,000 lbs, or
  
• 700,000 lbs
  

Doing the math, enough explosive was stolen to destroy

• (771618 lbs/5lbs) x 12 airliners = 1,851,883 metric airliners,
• 1,881,600 long ton airliners, or
• 1,680,000 short ton airliners.

In all, I am certain they could destroy just about every airplane in the world and have some left over, making this a bit of a silly analogy on the part of CBC. I suspect, given the opportunity, they would use it to defend against the Yankee invasion, or choose to blow up infrastructure like roads, airports, bridges, tankers, and power plants.

The case of the spoon

In the nascent years of Javascript, I cohorted to create something we called a spoon: a self-replicating non-interactive javascript. This was possible because of user editable unescaped HTML being printed to some online dynamic content.

In the case of a message board, for example, we would have javascript look at the user's address book and send itself to every user in it. The user would be oblivious, but it would DoS the server very quickly, as more users were exposed to it, and a cascade effect would result.

The term spoon was probably coined during the height of the Matrix fad.

Google's growth

Where does this blog get its money? Well, I guess Google AdSense is a good start. With good targeted advertising, free content from blogs, and sensible traffic, they have a very interesting and novel business model. Their outstanding costs are effectively the maintenance of the servers, and bandwidth costs.

Having just switched to Linux, blogger.com can now cheaply scale up to the needs of a ferocious growth in users. The growth in the number of users is a sign of a pending shift in information delivery.

Fundamentally, this shift in the paradigm of information flow is from mass media to grassroots, so to speak. There is a question of the sustainability of this online mechanism, but the logistics are incredible. As the cost of hardware and bandwidth is consistently dropping, the number of users is growing.

Based on my BlogID, there are up to 8 million users. If even one in a hundred has an advertisement, and only one in a hundred of those has a click once a day, that is still 800 clicks a day, which at $0.50 a click, works out to $400 a day, or $146,000 a year. This very conservative estimate should more than adequately cover the cost of the hardware and bandwidth. It does not cover the cost of development, but google's IPO has provided a substantial amount of funding for that, which can be recovered over time.

In all, this looks to be an interesting change in the relationships between people. Mind you, some blogs have seen millions of users over nearly a decade, such as The Keeper's (warning: contains nudity).

The interesting problem, which Google seems interested in addressing, is how to find people of similar interests, and more importantly perhaps, how to reduce the signal to noise ratio. An old Garfield comic once said "you have two ears and a mouth so you can tell half of what you hear". Some people seem to have a much lower input to output ratio, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

Artistic Incentives

Introduction
Wherein lies the greatest caveat in media? I would argue that it is that artistic producers are compensated prior to evaluation by the user.

You pay before you know
Before you buy a CD or go to the theatre, you have no idea what the quality of the goods will be. As these creations are legally constructed monopolies, through copyright law, they are not subject to the traditional market forces of supply and demand in the same way, so their perceived value at time of purchase may be drastically different from their actual entertainment value.

Big money makers are all too often terrible movies
You can witness the effects in successful but critically horrific films such as Shark Tale and The Grudge. Admittedly, these films may be very entertaining in spite of their critical disdain, but I can personally attest to an endless stream of big-budget, grandly marketed films that have left me feeling dissappointed. And yet, a plethora of low-budget films are often highly entertaining, such as Capturing the Friedmans. Were you able to decide after sampling the goods how much it was worth, some of lackluster blockbusters would no doubt go without the compensation guaranteed by your ticket, and your money could go to some gems.

How much to pay per item
Payment based on usage must be mandatory; I am certain that a donation scheme is not the way to go. I believe that you should pay into a pool a set rate for each film or song that you buy, but that you can vary a substantial percentage of the price you paid between the consumed entertainment. For example, having watched Shark Tale, The Grudge, and Capturing the Friedmans, you pay $10 each. However, you are given an option, after the evaluation, to distribute 80% the $30 total how you see fit. You can give $24 to Capturing the Friedmans for entertaining you, with a mandatory $2 to each of the other busts. This rewards for entertainment value, and not just their marketing capacity. A mandatory minimum for each film seems to be a wise way to provide for some compensation, though it is by no means necessary.

Federal regulation
It might be argued that this system begs to be placed into a federal program for artistic compensation, but I see no reason why it cannot be commercialized in the digital domain. A company can offer downloads of the movies, charging the set rate, and permit users to redistribute the funds based on their perceived entertainment value. This will reward the good at the expense of the bad, and encourage a movement away from the trend of well marketed but otherwise horrible movies.

Criticism of federal taxation
As well, federal compensation systems through taxation of blank media or internet usage inherently seem to involve taxing everyone indiscriminately. They also seem to have no adequate means to redistribute the funds, and rather propose inadequate schemes of approximation. As media technologies for transport and storage are not tied closely to content, they are not precise enough to justify a tax upon. The most appropriate solution is to permit a marketplace where content is paid for by users, and allow the technology to be cheaper so more of the users funds can go into the content they benefitted from, as opposed to subsidizing content they have not chosen to support.

On subscriptions
Subscription based models are fine so long as they compensate adequately, as a reflection of user choice. A flat rate subscription may permit some users to download far more than others at the same price, which as a matter of economics may be fine for the subscription company. A far more elegant system is a pay on-demand system which permits users to redistribute the funds.

Conclusion
The incentive structure for CD's and movies are grossly inadequate. It is now becoming possible to provide consumers with a better model of funding for those artistic producers they support, as opposed to the hit-and-miss method currently employing sophisticated marketing techniques instead of producing quality.

Notable exception
One interesting exception to the conundrum of artistic valuation is the video game industry, and in particular the online video game industry. It is a bastion of capitalism in the world of copyright protection, where users have access to decent reviews, and the industry has a strong incentive to invest intelligently and produce quality. In the case of online games it is exceptional in that, by adhering to a subscription model, they must offer a quality of service in additon to a competitive product.

Kudos to the other blogs

Lawrence Lessig's and Michael Balsom's blogs garner my attention once in a while, albeit for wholly different reasons. Lessig's has a guest blog, William Fisher, who seems to be advocating a system of government compensation that I resolutely opposed in the 2003/2004 Blank Audio Media Levy proposed by the CPCC. Such a system would get passed only if it substantially benefits those with the lobbyists: good for the few (recording/movie industry) at the expense of the many. You can read my comments on Mr. Fisher's proposal.

The beginning of a rant

I often wonder how the institutions of education interfere with the capacity to learn. I've become a big fan of the wikipedia. It seems to provide endless collaborative information. I often wonder of the forces that would seek to limit such information, and the limits that such freedom can be made to a masses with conflicting goals.

For example, how useful is it to know how to make napalm, or nuclear weapons. The institutions of modern society, in particular those of capitalism, fascism, and representative democracy, are vehemently opposed to the dissemination of information that undermine their control over society. I suspect their opposition comes not out of altruism, but out of a reverence for control. A modern priesthood.

I guess this will be a theme of my blog: criticism of right-wing capitalistic theory, that control of information, among other things, is inherent to western society. Critical though I may be, bear in mind that the institutions of wealth in modern western society are very successful, and have led to great wealth creation and dispersion. Only in modern times, however, has the capacity of information creation and access become so prevalent has it begun to threaten the sophisticated forces of knowledge prevention (ie. marketing).

First blog

Boozing last night. I figure that's a good way to start a public blog. Surrounded by people and things I love and cherish, this is a place I would like to last forever.