Response to Bono's Views on Internet and IP

http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2832

Bono’s insinuation that content must be tagged, tracked, and protected in the interest of the creator is an uneven (if not borderline fascist) suggestion.

The biggest problem with this is that bandwidth regulation affects not just entertainment (whether downloaded, streamed, for pay or for free) but everything else that operates in the digital space.

Which includes education, charity, government, and most ironically, the development, production, and broadcast of creative content itself.

Read up on Net Neutrality Bono. The movie industry is booming (in spite of a relative abundance of poor content). But the service providers aren’t just stuffing their pockets with profit, they’re limiting both consumers and creators by throttling bandwidth.

Don’t wage war on the Internet, Bono. Talk about putting your back up against the wall… please don’t go singing that song.

Response to Bono's Sexy-Fascist Dream Car

Bono’s Sexy-Fascist Dream Car [Henry Payne]

Detroit — Can’t fit enough go-green lecturing in the pages of the New York Times from Thomas Friedman — he of the 10,000-square-foot mansion and globetrotting carbon footprint? The paper of record has tapped international do-gooder Bono (a.k.a., Paul Hewson) — the jet-setting U2 rocker whose world tour just left a Madonna-dwarfing,65,000-ton carbon footprint — to lecture us on car design.

Since this drivel appeared on the Sunday Times op-ed page, we’ll take it seriously.

“How is it that the country that made us all fall in love with the automobile has failed, with only a few exceptions, to produce a single family sedan with the style and humor and grace of the cars produced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s?” he laments. That’s Item #1 of his ten ideas, humbly touted as having the “potential to change our world.”

As a student of green (see Item #3 which proposes “an equal right to pollute” — a sort of personal carbon cap), Bono seems ignorant of the fact that the green diktats he embraces are precisely what killed off style, grace, and humor.

Thanks to draconian mpg laws begun in the 1970s, manufacturers have increasingly designed cars as aerodynamic soap bars, reducing their drag-coefficient and raising their fuel efficiency (the exception being boxy SUVs, born of CAFE’s truck loophole and which Bono also resents). That template has been taken to the extreme with egg-shaped hybrid cars so beloved by green celebs like Bono.

The Irish Obamaphile then concludes with this incredible graph: “It hurts me to say this about democracy, but rarely does majority rule produce something of beauty. That’s why the Obama administration — while it still holds the keys to the big automakers — ought to put some style fascists into the mix: Steve Jobs, Frank Gehry, Jeff Koons. Put the great industrial designers in the front seat, right along with sound financial stewardship . . . the greener, the cleaner, the meaner on fossil fuels, the sexier for me. Check out the Tesla or the Fisker Karma car, designed by the same team that gave the world the Aston Martin.”

Forget the irony of the ultimate beneficiary of personal liberty — a rock singer — embracing anything fascist. No matter the designer, Mr. Hewson, the government’s already “fascist” rules are so strict that he will have no choice but to pen cars that look like Priuses. Unless, of course, their customers are spoiled, rich rock stars who can afford $80,000 electric Aston Martins by Fisker.

Six Sentence Refutation of John Rawls

Advice for Law Professor Hiring Candidates (a.k.a. Guts and Throwup)

Here at UCLA., we're heading in the teeth of the academic appointments season with 8 candidate call backs in the next month. I think we've got some great candidates, but the prospect does prompt me to offer them and all the other law professor candidates that'll be doing faculty presentations in the next month or so:

In Family Man, Calvin Trillin describes the evocative phrase coined by one of his daughters to describe some of the odder corners of cuisine: "guts and throwup." I've often been tempted to apply that phrase to some prominent favorites of my fellow law professors; e.g., John Rawls. Why? Because I often feel that if I have to listen to one more candidate presentation by one more 20-something academic wannabe describing how s/he has solved some Rawlsian puzzle, I will throw up my guts.

As always, if you want a legal academic job done right, you ask a corporate law scholar. My friend Bill Carney, for example, once published a brilliant essay (unfortunately, I have been unable to find it on the internet), in which he dissected the whole Rawlsian enterprise in a mere six sentences:

John Rawls and his followers argue that risk averse individuals operating from behind a veil of ignorance would choose a society, under a social compact, that contained some kind of social safety net. [FN25] That safety net, of course, protects both innocent unfortunates and those who have brought their misfortunes on themselves. This fact is rarely mentioned in pleas for more of a safety net. It is, as two scholars said, as if all persons with poverty level incomes suddenly woke up in this circumstance and said "woe is me." [FN26] This is a view of a world without fault, where no one is responsible for his or her own actions or inactions. Robert Nozick, in response to Rawls's work, has demonstrated the slippery slope that this creates, where others can claim increasing duties from each of us, until we return to a state of modern slavery similar to that known in the Soviet Union, where the rhetoric was about substantive equality. [FN27]

_____

[FN25]. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971). The underlying assumption is that need is perfectly correlated with no fault on the part of the needy and that the needy bear no responsibility for their condition.

[FN26]. Frank H. Easterbrook & Daniel R. Fischel, The Corporate Contract, 89 Colum. L. Rev. 1416, 1419 (1989), expressed this problem in the context of corporate law:

Suppose the world is static. Everyone awakes one morning to find himself a manager or an investor. The veil of ignorance is suddenly parted. The manager exalts: "Aha! No one can stop me!" The investors gasp: "Woe is me, I'm powerless." This is the natural view of one who draws a line at a moment in time without asking how the world came to be as it is.

[FN27]. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia 290-92 (1974).

Reading for This Week

For this week, please read Bono's op-ed piece in the New York Times