Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, this table shows manufacturing activity (as measured by the ISM's Purchasing Managers Index) around the world. Only China and the Czech Republic are showing positive improvement. Three countries are contracting, but doing so a little bit slower than last month, and everyone else is just plain doing worse. Not good news.

Is piracy of digital information (music, videos, ebooks, etc.) the same as stealing?  Matt Yglesias says no:

The two acts have almost nothing in common besides being illegal. If I email you a copy of the new Fountains of Wayne album, then nobody has less stuff than they had pre-emailing. By contrast, if I break into Adam Schlesinger’s house, take his shoes, and then give the shoes to you, the upshot is that Schlesinger has less shoes than he had before.

I've always been bothered by this argument. Let's take a closer look at it.

First, what's the effect of stealing Adam Schlesinger's shoes? Saying that he has "less shoes" than before is correct, but in a money economy, if you want to compare two different things you really want to convert them into dollar values first. So what is Schlesinger's financial loss here? Is it the retail price of the shoes? That's one way of looking at it. But in the real world, we usually make some adjustments. If Schlesinger bought the shoes at a discount store, they're worth less to him. If the shoes are old, they're worth less still. If Schlesinger never liked the shoes in the first place and doesn't wear them anymore, maybe they're worth almost nothing. Who knows? Basically, though, what you can say is that his financial loss is the retail price of the shoes modified by some factor that depends on circumstances.

Now, what if we steal a copy of his new album? What's his financial loss? Is it the retail cost of the album? Again, that's one way of looking at it. But in the real world we make adjustments. If the album is normally sold at a discount, it's worth less. If we only care about Schlesinger, and not the rest of the production chain, then his loss is the royalty payment he won't get on the album you didn't buy. On the other hand, if you just downloaded the album on a lark and never would have paid real money for it in the first place, his loss is almost nothing. Who knows? But again, what you can say is that that his financial loss is the retail price of the album modified by some factor that depends on circumstances.

Economically, this is all that matters. In both cases, you're causing Adam Schlesinger to take a financial loss. Maybe it's big, maybe it's small, but it's theoretically quantifiable. That makes these cases very similar.

Now, it's true that there are lots of ways of causing people to take a financial loss, and not all of them come under the rubric of stealing. So at first glance, it might seem fair to object to the word in a digital context. But in actual operation, this objection rarely strikes me as arising out of sophisticated arguments about nonrival goods. Rather, it mostly seems to be a way of avoiding the very real fact that you've caused someone a financial loss by appropriating something you haven't paid for. In that sense, "stealing" is a whole lot more descriptive than "copyright infringement" or "illegal downloading."

None of this is meant to take sides on the broader questions of appropriate copyright policy or intellectual property law in general. For the most part, I tend to agree with the pro-reform camp on these issues, and I think that lots of corporate abuse of current IP law is both foolish and blinkered. Still, no matter what kind of IP rules you favor, if you break those rules I think that calling it stealing is pretty close to the mark. Matt finishes with this:

In some ways I think the decision of the pro-copying community to try to appropriate the language of “sharing” as an alternative to the language of “piracy” simply served to obscure how genuinely different digital copying is. Even if you and I “share” a physical object, there are still limits. If I borrow my girlfriend’s car to drive somewhere, I haven’t stolen it from her, but it’s genuinely the case that she can’t use it until I bring it back. If she copies a file I own, then we both have it.

True enough. But if he had a draft magazine article stored on his hard drive, and his girlfriend copied it and sold it somewhere without his knowledge, I'll bet he'd consider it stolen — possibly with the word emphasized by hurled crockery and intemperate language. He'd consider it stolen even though, technically, he still has a copy too. And he'd be right to. Before the theft, he had the potential to earn a certain amount of money by selling the publishing rights to his work. Afterward, he didn't. That potential may not be a tangible physical object, but that doesn't make it a nonrival good. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Yesterday I posted a chart from a group called Medical Billing and Coding Certification that featured an astonishing statistic: in the U.S., one out of seven hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) leads to death. That's 14%. In Europe the number is only 1 out 122, or a mere 0.8%.






Here's my favorite passage:





Our Eternal Senate

While I was writing the previous post, I happened to look up the process for amending the Constitution, and I noticed something I hadn't registered before. Here's Article V:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, [blah blah blah] Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Huh. If that says what I think it says, it means the Senate in its current form is eternal. Not even a constitutional amendment can eliminate it or reform it unless literally every state agrees. Since 1808 has long since come and gone, that means this is the only absolutely immutable part of our national machinery, the one and only thing that can never be touched. Sort of an odd choice to be given such lofty distinction, no?

Rick Perry thinks Supreme Court justices should serve 18-year terms instead of having lifetime appointments. Jon Chait says this is a rare example of a smart Perry policy:

The current system of lifetime tenure creates real problems. Huge policy swings hinge on the simple health and longevity of Supreme Court justices. This results in very old justices clinging to their seats until a sufficiently friendly president can take office. It also gives presidents an incentive to nominate the youngest possible justice who can be confirmed, as opposed to the most qualified possible justice. And eliminating some element of the sheer randomness by which each party gets to appoint justices would tend to reduce the chances of the court swinging too far one way or another from the mainstream of legal thought.

It's hard to imagine the incentive structure for any president to propose such a reform — why volunteer to the the first president whose judicial nominees don't get lifetime tenure? But it is slightly reassuring to see glimmers of sense in Perry's platform.

Why be the first president to volunteer for this? That would depend on how it was implemented. It would require a constitutional amendment, and I imagine a constitutional amendment could affect sitting justices. So a president might agree to this as long as the amendment limited the terms not just of new justices, but also of sitting justices, starting with the longest-serving ones. That could end up working out fairly favorably.

More to the point, though, the president wouldn't get a chance to volunteer in the first place. Presidents have no role in the constitutional amendment process. Still, the same logic applies to the president's party in Congress, so that's a nit. So who knows? Maybe it could be done with the proper amount of fiddling around the edges.

But this brings up another question: why is Perry in favor of this? Is it just part of the general movement conservative outrage over "activist judges"? Perry seems to believe that term limits would "restrict the unlimited power of the courts to rule over us with no accountability," but I don't really see that. It's equally hard to see how you'd conclude that this would be institutionally favorable toward either liberals or conservatives unless you're really, really sure that your side is going to control the White House more often than the other.

Meh. It's probably a mug's game to try and dig too deep into Perry's mind here. My guess is that "judges bad, term limits good" is about as far as he's considered things. Still, for the usual goo goo liberal reasons that Chait lists, I'd support him on this. Let's hear it for term limits on Supreme Court justices.

WikiLeaks still hasn't published the full cache of diplomatic cables that it began releasing last year. So should they? The Guardian reports:

WikiLeaks is conducting an online poll of its Twitter followers to decide whether the whistleblowing site should publish in full its unredacted cache of US diplomatic cables.

Hmmm. A Twitter poll. I wonder how that's going to turn out?

WikiLeaks appeared likely to use the Twitter responses, which it said favoured disclosure at a ratio of 100 to one, to pave the way for imminent disclosure of the remaining material from its cable archive.

Consider me non-shocked. Anyway, if you read the whole story it turns out this is apparently all part of the ongoing war between Julian Assange and the Guardian. One way or another, though, it looks as if we're all going to have access to the entire cache of cables soon enough.



More graphic at the link.






