From the Washington Post:

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

Am I committing a crime when iTunes copies my MP3's into RAM to play them? Or worse, what if iTunes allocates virtual RAM on my hard drive? And what if I'm mounting the drive remotely?

Copyright was conceived in a time when duplicating media was something that no one but publishers would ever care to do. Books were sold, read, and shared without ever making copies of them. But doing any one of those things on a computer means making a copy of electronic data, and the sole right to copy is no longer a reasonable understanding of intellectual ownership. If copyright is going to be relevant in twenty years, we're going to have to come to a very different understanding of what copyright entails.

Update: To be clear, the RIAA is not filing suit on the basis of CD ripping being illegal, though they do maintain that it is.

Shameless self-promotion

I hate to shamelessly self-promote, but I have a new post on my personal blog, The West at Yale, about an atheist-turned-deist trying to "prove" God with recent scientific evidence. If anyone is interested in my musings on proving God versus believing in God, you should go check it out.

Liberty and liberals

Ezra Klein treats libertarianism as some strange phenomenon:

It is what Paul calls "liberty." It is anti-imperialist, anti-PATRIOT Act, anti-wiretapping. But it is also anti-foreign aid, anti-Social Security, anti-Medicare, anti-government. His would be a world in which the United States neither invades Iraq nor uses its tax code to fund a system of pension supports and health care guarantees for the elderly. A world in which we cut our military aid to Israel, and end the minimum wage. A world in which we close down the wiretapping program, and allow states to close down a woman's access to an abortion. This is the world he is selling to his supporters, this is the definition of liberty that his candidacy will seek to propagate. (italics mine)

This description of Paul's libertarian society treats it from the get-go as a dystopia with a silver lining, carefully walking his liberal readers through (what he thinks to be) a difficult conception.

This summer I was at Cato University and I was dismayed that so many young libertarians were asking panelists whether they should vote Republican or Democrat to advance the cause, and then protesting and arguing when the panelists said the GOP was more liberty-friendly than the Democrats. The hangup that Cato panelists had (and I explicitly remember Brian Doherty fighting off repeated questions insisting that Democrats were the new party of liberty) is that they fear the free market. While liberals are on-board with personal liberty, they refuse to couple it with ending impositions on economic liberty by the state, and instead insist on this definition of liberty that involves government-sponsored economic empowerment. Republicans, on the other hand, are working with a good definition of liberty: they are generally behind free markets and deregulation and they tend to regulate personal liberty when it is likely to pass external costs on to society. (The libertarian advocates getting rid of government programs that would have external costs to others when people abuse their personal liberty.)

Liberals don't get that idea about liberty, and Klein's blog post shows us why: "liberty," as a concept of being left alone to run one's own life and not some nebulous bastardization of "empowerment," is a completely foreign concept to American liberals.

Global warming?

The Denver Post notes that ski resorts across the country, not just in the drought-stricken West, are having a record season of good weather. Powerline also noticed the snowy weather earlier this week and the problem with Al Gore's doom-and-gloom predictions: the last two years have had abnormally calm hurricane seasons and cold is wreaking havoc around the globe.

I think solar variation hypotheses deserve a closer look.

Corporatism ruins Christmas

I had the considerable displeasure of flying home from New York this morning on United Airlines. They have managed to rebound from bankruptcy, but only by cutting costs everywhere: United has commoditized every possible convenience on an airplane. At check-in they offer passengers the stick-'em-up deal of paying $44 for an extra five inches of legroom. If you don't fork it over you can plan on having your knees digging into the seat in front of you for the duration of your flight. (This is all assuming that you even get to check in. Showing up at 4 am the United counter at Laguardia was deserted, despite the crowd of 200 holiday travelers waiting in line. The two-person staff that showed up at 4:25 am seemed less than enthused about customer service.)

This all reveals something about the preferences of Americans versus other nations with federally-subsidized and protected airlines. Americans prefer cheap airfare over luxury, and Europeans choose the opposite. I could have accepted my choice in airline this morning for that very reason, except for one nagging pain: the federal government spent billions of dollars keeping United from going under, and in return the American people get jam-packed seats and charges for every marginal convenience.

Flying out of Laguardia this morning was surreal. Perhaps it was being in the terminal at 4 am, and perhaps it is because Laguardia is hands-down the scummiest airport in America, but the whole thing was like one of those airports in Africa with people taking chickens on some hand-me-down Soviet clunker:

Note the visibly flaking paint on the fuselage. If they take such poor care of the visible parts of the plane, imagine what costs they're cutting where you can't see?

Moral of the story: without government bailouts we probably would have lost flight capacity and had higher prices... but it's better politically to hide the costs in your tax returns than to let the free market weed out the weaklings.

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