Quotulatiousness

January 19, 2012

Chris Dodd would like to tell all you scummy pirates that your feeble protest is an abuse of power

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Cory Doctorow reminds us that former Senator, now head of the MPAA (one of the organizations pushing hardest for the adoption of SOPA and PIPA) has already added so much to your DVD-watching enjoyment:

After all, he is the CEO of the organization responsible for inserting those unskippable FBI warnings (which are highly prejudiced and factually incorrect, advising, for example, that DVDs can’t be rented, even though the law says they can) before every commercial DVD. He’s the CEO of the organization that inserts those insulting PSAs in front of every movie chiding those of us who buy our DVDs because someone else decided to download the same movie for free.

And he’s the CEO of the organization responsible for the section of the DMCA that makes it illegal to build a DVD player that can skip these mandatory, partisan, commercially advantageous messages.

So he knows a thing or two about “abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

You know, the kind of stuff that makes you feel like this guy:

And here’s the reason you pay for a legal copy, rather than being one of those evil pirates:

January 13, 2012

Movie and music piracy: what’s the real economic cost?

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

On the Freakonomics blog, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman look at the actual costs of piracy compared to the ludicrous claimed costs:

Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.

These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs — that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.

The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”

More recently, a smaller estimate — $58 billion — was produced by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). But that IPI estimate, as both Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have pointed out, is replete with methodological problems, including double- and triple-counting, that swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably.

January 6, 2012

Michael Geist: help save Canada’s liberal public domain rules

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

Canada’s standards for when works enter the public domain are more liberal than those in the US and Europe (that is, we provide shorter — but still generous — periods of copyright protection). Michael Geist says that these standards may be at risk soon:

Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).

In an interesting coincidence, the Canadian government filed notice of a public consultation on December 31, 2011 on the possible Canadian entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, trade talks that could result in an extension in the term of copyright that would mean nothing new would enter the Canadian public domain until 2032 or beyond. The TPP covers a wide range of issues, but its intellectual property rules as contemplated by leaked U.S. drafts would extend the term of copyright, require even stricter digital lock rules, restrict trade in parallel imports, and increase various infringement penalties. As I noted last month, if Canada were to ratify the TPP, it would require another copyright bill to undo much of what the government is about to enact with Bill C-11.

January 5, 2012

The MPAA over-cooks their numbers to support SOPA

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Techdirt reports on the work done by Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute to actually scrutinize the “loss” numbers used by the MPAA:

One of the things we’ve noticed in the debate over SOPA and PIPA is just how the other side is really lying with statistics. We’ve done a thorough debunking of the stats used by the US Chamber of Commerce to support both bills, as well as highlighted the misleading-to-bogus stats used by Lamar Smith in his support of the bill.

But every day, more bogus stats are rolled out. Julian Sanchez, over at the Cato Institute, has decided to dig into one specific bogus number, the supposed claim of $58 billion in “losses,” and to show how the numbers don’t hold up to any scrutiny. In fact, using the details of where the numbers came from, Sanchez makes the case that SOPA won’t save a single net job for the US economy. Read on to find out how.

First off, the $58 billion comes from an absolutely laughable report for the Institute for Policy Innovation, done every year by Stephen Siwek at a firm called Economists Incorporated. We’ve challenged this ridiculous number in the past, but not to the level of detail that Sanchez has here. He starts out by bringing up (as we have many times), Tim Lee’s excellent debunking of the ridiculous “ripple effects” that Siwek/IPI always use, despite them being a trick to double, triple, quadruple, etc count the same dollars [. . .]

December 22, 2011

Why Nazis?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Europe, Germany, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

A British MP is being investigated for attending a “Nazi-themed” party. A member of the royal family is photographed wearing Nazi regalia to a costume party. World War 2 fiction about Nazi Germany vastly outsells similar fiction about Fascist Italy or Imperial Japan. What is it about the Nazis that Brits find so fascinating? In a Spectator article from 2002, Guy Walters tracks the onset of the Nazi fascination in young Brits:

In some Englishmen this interest has mutated into a not-so-guilty admiration for the Nazis and their uniforms, their pageantry, their military brilliance and — this is the really terrible part — their brutality. It is emphatically not a condoning of the Holocaust; rather, a fetish that exists despite it. In its advanced state the fetish will have evolved into a secret yearning to march up and down a bedroom in the togs of a Hauptsturmführer, riding-boots shining, the red swastika armband set smartly against the blackness of the tunic, the silver death’s-head badge glinting on the peaked cap. Of course, the Beevor reader is a far cry from a Nazi fetishist; but I wonder whether Beevor would enjoy such staggering sales figures if he had written only about the war in the Far East.

[. . .]

At the end of term, the flu now conveniently in remission, Mr Priestley unearths the projector and makes a selection from the school’s extensive range of films. The product of a broad mind, the library consists of just two works, The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone. Our nascent fetishist will be particularly drawn by the stylish ease with which David Niven carries off the wearing of an SS officer’s uniform. He will be less than impressed, however, with Edward Fox’s absurdly pukka sergeant in the latter film.

His small head brimming with Nazis, our subject goes home for four solid weeks of constructing Airfix Messerschmitts, Stukas, Heinkels and Dorniers. He will know that the correct colour of the underside of most Luftwaffe aircraft corresponds to Humbrol’s ‘duck-egg blue’. If his condition is particularly advanced, the subject’s mother will be asked to purchase a Tamiya Jagdpanther tank, which he will place in a ‘diorama’, a word he will use in no other context. By now, he should be showing further classic early symptoms of a Nazi fetish: Allied aircraft and armour will hold little or no interest. Most of the young fetishist’s exercise books will be adorned with thousands of tiny swastikas.

[. . .]

By puberty, the fetishist will have repeatedly watched every war film available, including A Bridge Too Far, The Night of the Generals, The Dirty Dozen, The Eagle Has Landed, The Boys from Brazil, Cross of Iron and, for a younger generation, Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. He will have read Pat Reid’s Escape from Colditz and Airey Neave’s They Have Their Exits.

When our subject starts in the sixth form, it is here that the fetish can be incorporated into, and disguised by, his academic studies. Naturally he chooses modern history for one of his A-levels, and his special topic will, of course, be Nazi Germany. He will now be introduced to the diaries of Nazi bigwigs such as Albert Speer, which will breathe life into sinister figures such as Himmler and Goering. In fact, the widespread predilection for Nazi Germany as an A-level subject has angered many university tutors, who have complained recently that it is the only period of history about which undergraduates have any real knowledge.

December 21, 2011

“It’s A Wonderful Life is a movie that only an Occupod could love”

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:31

Michael Graham explains why the much-loved Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life is actually awful:

Consider George Bailey. In your mind, you see him after a lifetime of poverty, grief and bad luck, running through Bedford Falls shouting “Merry Christmas you old Building and Loan,” just happy to have a family he loves.

Well I agree that having a loving family can help us all get through crises. (Remember the stewardess in the disaster-film spoof “Airplane?” “At least I had a husband . . . ”)

But the name of the film is “Wonderful Life,” not, “Well, Things Could Be Worse.” And in George Bailey’s case, things are truly tragic.

Smart, ambitious George gets stuck at the modest Building and Loan back in Hickville when his brother marries into a cushy corporate gig and his father dies. After years of dreaming of going off to college, traveling the world and becoming a top engineer or architect, his life is spent scraping by, and helping others do the same.

Somehow the movie — like the Occupiers of today — tries to turn that into a virtue. Despite his wife and kids, George turns down $20,000 a year so he won’t have to work for that “evil banker,” Mr. Potter.

Occupy Bedford Falls!

December 18, 2011

MPAA strategy shift: when the truth won’t serve, just lie

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd is making the rounds in DC, trying to gin up support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, which establishes a national censorship regime in which whole websites can be blocked in the US if the MPAA objects to them. The former senator turned shill has run out of plausible arguments in favor of the bill, so he’s resorted to really, really stupid lies.

Case in point: Dodd recently told the Center for American Progress that “The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone.”

Of course, this is a flat-out, easily checked, ridiculous lie.

Tyler Cowen on “aesthetic stagnation”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

Responding to an article in Vanity Fair by Kurt Andersen, Cowen lists a few things that must be taken into consideration:

1. Movies: The Hollywood product has regressed, though one can cite advances in 3-D and CGI as innovations in the medium if not always the aesthetics. The foreign product is robust in quality, though European films are not nearly as innovative as during the 1960s and 70s. Still, I don’t see a slowdown in global cinema as a whole.

2. TV: We just finished a major upswing in quality for the best shows, though I fear it is over, as no-episode-stands-alone series no longer seem to be supported by the economics.

3. Books/fiction: It’s wrong to call graphic novels “new,” but they have seen lots of innovation. If we look at writing more broadly, the internet has led to plenty of innovation, including of course blogs. The traditional novel is doing well in terms of quality even if this is not a high innovation era comparable to say the 1920s (Mann, Kafka, Proust, others).

4. Computer and video games: This major area of innovation is usually completely overlooked by such discussions.

He also includes something which — at least for me — counts as a “killer app” for this kind of discussion:

7. Your personal stream: This is arguably the biggest innovation in recent times, and it is almost completely overlooked. It’s about how you use modern information technology to create your own running blend of sources, influences, distractions, and diversions, usually taken from a blend of the genres and fields mentioned above. It’s really fun and most of us find it extremely compelling

That “personal stream” is so pervasive that we generally don’t notice that it’s a hallmark of the modern era. We don’t get our news from single sources anymore: not just a single local newspaper, or a single TV newscast. We can easily find like-minded communities for just about all our niche interests with relatively minimal effort. In the past, such communities were severely distance-challenged to even form, never mind to thrive.

That we now can easily control and direct our personal streams to include and exclude in such fine gradations is something that few could even imagine 20 years ago. In a sense, we all have “clipping services” providing us with interesting and relevant snippets, but we can literally have hundreds of such services — at little or no cost — to chase down our merest whims for fresh information. It doesn’t show up on the GNP as a gain, but it’s very much a differentiator between today and just a few years back. Yet we don’t notice because we’re immersed in it.

December 8, 2011

The Law of Misguided Subsidies

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

T.J. Rogers explains the latest corollary to the well-known Law of Unintended Consequences (for examples of that law in operation, see your local, regional, or national government):

Wall Street understands how to make money, up-market or down. “Margin Call” may fuel Occupy movement ire, but in creating mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street did nothing other than facilitate home-financing access to the next tier of less-qualified home buyers, as demanded by every president since Bill Clinton. After that, the bankers did exactly what their shareholders wanted: bundle those risky loans into securities, sell them to lock in the profits, and dump the risk right back onto the federal government — where it belonged.

My purpose is not to debate the morality of mortgage-backed securities but to update the Law of Unintended Consequences with the corollary Law of Misguided Subsidies: Whenever Washington disrupts a market by dumping subsidies into it, Wall Street will find a way to pocket a majority of the money while the intended subsidy beneficiaries are harmed by the resulting market turmoil.

Rogers also explains why so many “special Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs)” are getting into the solar power business — not the manufacturing side, but the retail side. The profit margins are obscene. If the government hadn’t set up the market to work this way with their subsidies, the profit margins would be much lower.

November 28, 2011

Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:

So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)

1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.

Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).

So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …

2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.

Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.

That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.

November 27, 2011

Scalzi tweets the Lord of the Rings movies

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Stream of consciousness tweets as John Scalzi has an at-home movie marathon:

“The Mimes of Moria” is the name of my next band.

Wife is at a rock concert tonight. I’m watching cable TV at home. Thus are illustrated the differences between us.

OSHA clearly has no jurisdiction in Moria.

[. . .]

The Two Towers now I on. I hold the minority view that it is the best film of the trilogy.

That said, I’d’ve trimmed back the ent scenes pretty severely.

I SWEAR I did not realize I was making a tree pun in that last tweet.

I am suddenly aware of just how little difference there is between Orlando Bloom’s Legolas and certain sparkly vampires one could name.

Orcs vs. Stormtroopers. GO. On second thought, never mind. Neither side aims well enough for it to be interesting.

[. . .]

Fun fact: Shadowfax, the horse Gandalf rides, had a younger, hipper sibling named “Darktweet.”

I wonder what dentists think when they look at Orcs. I suspect “that’s a sailboat right there.”

They could have just distracted the Wargs by throwing a bunch of red bouncy balls and yelling “fetch.”

The orcs would be awesome in a Road Warrior movie. The orcs probably WERE in a Road Warrior movie.

November 26, 2011

TV commercials don’t have to be irritating

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Scott Jordan Harris explains that the purpose of TV advertising isn’t — despite all the evidence to the contrary — to irritate the hell out of viewers:

Many of the best short films I see each year are adverts, and this shouldn’t be surprising. There is a small audience for shorts that aren’t shot by Pixar and shown before Disney films, and there are miniscule budgets available for them. Most shorts are apprentice pieces, showy announcements of the skills of film-makers who want to be making features, and display so many signs of it that they fail as individual films.

Adverts do not suffer these problems: their budgets are relatively big, their audience numbers are assured, and they are by nature self-contained. What’s more, they have to be good — very, very good — if they are going to outcompete their rivals.

To disregard commercials as beneath consideration — to adopt the ‘it’s just an advert for a shop!’ mentality that Brooker has, or pretends to have — is naïve, and flows from the feeling that adverts are inherently artistically bankrupt, or rather that they are any more artistically bankrupt than the majority of movies.

This is simply not the case. Most movies are designed to sell us something, from popcorn and DVDs to high-end items advertised through the sophisticated trickery of product placement. Compared to blockbuster films, which charge admission to sell us merchandise, a television advert is relatively benign: it does not pretend to be anything other than it is and it honestly announces its intentions.

This why a good advert is so pleasing: being won over by one is like being won over by a magician’s illusion. We know that it wants to suck us in, and so we are on guard against it. When, despite ourselves, it manages to amuse us, we know it has worked hard to do so.

November 5, 2011

George Jonas: A plot too crazy not to be true

Filed under: Media, Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

The alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador is too unrealistic for Hollywood, but George Jonas says it’s also too crazy not to be real:

If someone came up with an outlandish plot in which two Iranian agents, acting on behalf of government circles in Tehran, scheme with Mexican drug lords to blow up a Saudi ambassador on American soil, would a California screenwriter buy into it before a Virginia intelligence analyst, or would it be the other way around?

Place your bets.

[. . .]

Iranians are smart. If they weren’t smart, we wouldn’t have to worry about them building bombs. Do smart people come up with stupid plots? Not plausible. And look at the amateur pitch. Here’s a story that not only sounds like a B-movie, but is unveiled at a press conference that looks like a poster for a low-budget diversity flick: An African-American Attorney-General (Holder) flanked by a male Caucasian FBI Director (Robert S. Mueller) and a female Caucasian Assistant Attorney-General for National Security (Lisa Monaco) with a male Asian-American U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Preet Bharara) hovering in the background. It’s early Hollywood multicultural chic. All that’s missing is the line “Coming to a theatre near you.”

This amuses the intelligence analyst. “The trouble with Hollywood-types,” he says, “is that they’ve manipulated reality for so long, they can’t even recognize it when they see it. Does your friend think Holder and Mueller and Monaco and Bharara are from Central Casting? Hello! They are who they are. Life has caught up with multicultural chic. It imitates art — or at least imitates Hollywood.”

My spook friend goes further. “Yes, it’s a stupid plot and that’s why it rings true to me,” he says. “Most true stories of international intrigue sound like B-movies.”

November 4, 2011

The libertarian subtext to . . . Harold and Kumar?

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

David Boaz reviews the philosophical and economic underpinnings of the Harold and Kumar movies:

Escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger . . . to find ample food and unlimited choices . . . the pursuit of happiness . . . the American Dream. Yes, I think writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were on to something.

And then in the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, after another improbable road trip, the fugitive youths literally dropped in on George W. Bush’s Texas ranch. In the increasingly fantastic plot, the president invited them to join him in hiding from the scary Cheney, shared his pot with them, and then promised to clear up the unfortunate misunderstanding that landed them in Guantanamo Bay. An uninhibited but still skeptical Kumar said, “I’m not sure I trust our government any more, sir.” And President Bush delivered this ringing libertarian declaration:

    Hey, I’m in the government, and I don’t even trust it. You don’t have to trust your government to be a patriot. You just have to trust your country.

Harold & Kumar: more wisdom than a month of right-wing talk radio. Hurwitz and Schlossberg get what America is about.

Not having seen any of the movies, that certainly sounds like the kindest treatment George W. Bush has ever received from Hollywood.

October 28, 2011

Peter Foster suggests a rewritten plot for the Atlas Shrugged movie

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Peter Foster reviews the Atlas Shrugged movie:

The movie is set in today’s not-too-distant future, but has kept Dagny in railroads and Hank in metals by positing a massive oil crisis due to the implosion of the Middle East. The Dow at 4,000 we can believe, but oil at $37.50 a gallon? At that price, a Chevy Volt might actually not be such a bad deal. Domestic oil is once again king (despite being utterly unaffordable) but is being carried by train. Whatever happened to pipelines?

None of this makes much sense. Perhaps the plot should have been left as a future-of-the-past, like, say, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or it should have been thoroughly reformulated to reflect statism’s new threats. How’s this for a rewrite? Dagny now runs a pipeline company trying to build a huge new system for a form of oil previously uneconomic but now made available by wonderful advances in capitalist technology. Let’s say this oil is located in Alberta and her line is to go to the U.S. refineries of the Gulf Coast, to replace imports from dictatorships.

Hank is still in the steel industry but his new wonder metal is now to be used to build a cheaper, stronger and safer type of pipe. However, he is opposed not by other steel or pipe makers, but by a pack of meretricious, politically-savvy environmental NGOs. These organizations are fronted by naive chanting muddle heads, who have no idea where their rich lifestyles originate, and backed by capitalist foundations (the irony!) that have been hijacked by socialists, and by CEOs either too cowardly or stupid to say no (or by those who seek to take advantage of government handouts to produce throwback technologies). These NGOs claim that the oil is “dirty” and destroying the climate and that Hank Rearden’s new and better steel in unsafe, and threatens aquifers and environmentally sensitive areas. Their hysterical claims are eagerly swallowed by a gullible liberal media. Meanwhile politicians, despite high unemployment, are prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of jobs because they, too, are cowed by the ENGOs, and in any case attracted by the unparalleled power prospects of aspiring to control the weather.

I know this is all a bit far fetched, but we are talking a movie plot here.

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