Category: reason

Over at Locus, sci-fi
author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow outlines an
intriguing proposal on how to crowdsource a defense against
patent and copyright trolls. The basic collective action problem is
that trolls have a huge incentive (concentrated benefits) to demand
payments from thousands of allegedly infringing companies and
individuals (diffuse costs) under the threat of expensive lawsuits.
Doctorow reports that patent trolls extort $29 billion annually
from lawsuit-wary companies.

In his new article at Locus, Doctorow offers what he
calls the Magnificent
Seven solution. In that 1960 western movie, a farming
village hires seven gunslingers to help defend themselves against
extortionist bandits.

To counter patent trolls, Doctorow suggests that it might be
possible create a Kickstarter-like mechanism to aggregate fees from
companies and individuals to fight back against the trolls, making
it too expensive for them to threaten infringement lawsuits. From
Locus:

Imagine a Kickstarter-style service for a new kind of
class-action lawsuit: the class-action defense…

What would a Kickstarter for Class Action Defense look like?
Imagine if you could pledge, ‘‘I promise that I will withhold
license fees/settlements for [a bad patent/a fraudulent copyright
fee/a copyright troll’s threat] as soon as 100 other victims do the
same.’’ Or 1,000. Or 10,000. Hungry, entrepreneurial class-action
lawyers could bid for the business, offer opinions on the
win-ability of the actions, or even start their own kickstarters
(‘‘I promise I will litigate this question until final judgment if
1,000 threat-letter recipients promise to pay me half of what the
troll is asking.’’)

Basically, it’s the scene where the villagers decide to stop
paying the bandits and offer the next round of protection money to
the Magnificent Seven to defend them.

There’s a lot to like about this solution. Once a troll is
worried about a pushback from his victims, he’ll need to raise a
war-chest, and since the only thing a troll makes is lawsuits,
he’ll start sending more threats. Those threats will attract more
people to the kickstarter, raising its profile and its search-rank.
The more the troll wriggles, the more stuck he becomes.

Doctorow’s proposal does help solve this particular collective
action problem inside the bounds of our current legal environment.
As he notes:

Getting screwed by thieving, amoral ripoff artists sucks. The
reason people give in to the blackmail is because it is
unimaginably, impossibly expensive to fight back. I think that if
we can nudge ‘‘unimaginable and impossible’’ into the realm of mere
‘‘expensive and time-consuming,’’ we’d have armies lining up to
hand these crooks their asses.

As I have argued, a far better solution would be for Congress to
entirely eliminate software and business practice patents, and to
limit copyright to the life of the author plus ten years. In the
meantime, let’s go with Doctorow’s proposal.

For more background on how patent trolling stifles innovation,
see my column, “Patent
Trolls of Tech Fairy Godmothers.”

H/T Jeff Patterson.

Unless just about every polling outfit in
the country is wrong, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe should
cruise to victory in Tuesday’s election. Some conservatives blame
Libertarian Robert Sarvis for taking votes from Republican Ken
Cuccinelli. A. Barton Hinkle explains that it’s Cuccinelli’s
campaign could have fared better if he cared more about personal
and civil liberties.

View this article.

Unless just about every polling outfit in
the country is wrong, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe should
cruise to victory in Tuesday’s election. Some conservatives blame
Libertarian Robert Sarvis for taking votes from Republican Ken
Cuccinelli. A. Barton Hinkle explains that it’s Cuccinelli’s
campaign could have fared better if he cared more about personal
and civil liberties.

View this article.

The Senate is scheduled to vote
today on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which adds
sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of verboten
reasons to deny somebody employment. According to The
Washington Post, all 55 Democrats are on board. They need
five Republicans to join their side to avoid a filibuster and that
may well happen.

Then, of course, it will die in the Republican-controlled House.
It is probably not cynical to suggest that this is all part of the
plan. Okay – maybe it’s a little cynical. But gays were used as a
wedge issue by the right back in 2004 in the midst of the
struggling Iraq War. Now the left’s signature achievement under
Barack Obama’s administration is struggling. Given the incredibly
quick (historically speaking) shifts in opinion in favor toward
accepting gay people, it would be foolish of the left not to try to
run with this and force some tough choices on Republican congress
members leading up to the midterms. The Washington Post
notes that support for ENDA-like laws is now in the
majority in all states:

Nearly all recent opinion polls indicate that a large majority
of the American public — more than 70 percent — supports efforts to
make employment discrimination against gay and lesbians illegal. Of
course, these national numbers are not what the senators are likely
to care about. However, when we use national polls to estimate
opinion by state, we find that majorities in all 50 states support
ENDA-like legislation (note that in 1996, majorities in only 36
states supported ENDA). Today, public support ranges from a low of
63 percent in Mississippi to a high of 81 percent in
Massachusetts.

Libertarians who believe that hiring policies – even
discriminatory ones — fall under the First Amendment’s “freedom of
association” provision may end up getting lumped in with the
religious right on this one (not that this is a new thing).

I
wrote about the prospect of ENDA’s passage back in April,
wondering whether there was actually data that backed up a real
need for laws to protect against anti-gay discrimination in the
first place. Andrew Sullivan noted on Sunday that following the
passage of the federal hate crime laws in 2009, there have been
only two prosecutions for anti-gay cases. But despite Sullivan’s
previous opposition to anti-discrimination laws, he has relented:

[T]he libertarian position on such crimes is largely moot – for
good and ill. The sheer weight of anti-discrimination law is so
heavy and so entrenched in our legal culture and practice, no
conservative would seek to abolish it. It won’t happen. And if such
laws exist, and are integral to our legal understanding of minority
rights, then to deny protection to one specific minority (which is
very often the target of discrimination) while including so many
others, becomes bizarre at best, and bigoted at worst. Leaving gays
out sends a message, given the full legal context, that they don’t
qualify for discrimination protection, while African-Americans and
Jews and Catholics and Latinos and almost everyone else is covered
by such protections. It’s foolish to stick to a principle, however
sincere, in the face of this reality.

Secondly, the federal government has ceased its own
discrimination policies in marriage and military service and
therefore now has some small sliver of moral standing to lecture
private individuals across all states. My objections twenty years
ago are now moot.

Put those two developments together and I would not vote against
ENDA if I, God help us, were a Senator. But I would vote for it
with my eyes open. I don’t think it will make much difference in
reality just as I don’t believe hate crime laws make much
difference in reality. Of course that’s an empirical question and I
promise readers horrified by my luke-warm support of this that I
will gladly recant such skepticism if ENDA truly does lead to a
flurry of successful suits across the country against anti-gay
bias.

I think I’ll stick to my sincere principles. The ending of the
federal government’s discriminatory practices still doesn’t give
them moral standing to lecture anybody about anything. Governments
are not our moral guardians or arbiters and is still prone to
extending and retracting various privileges to certain citizens on
the basis of who is in control.

Over at Cato, Walter Olson out-cynics me by suggesting that
pushing ENDA is a way for politicians to take credit for cultural
shifts they had nothing to do with. He also wonders if
there is an upper limit the number of categories where private
actors’ rights of freedom of association will no longer apply:

[A]t some point we do need to stop adding new groups to the
parade—either that, or see freedom of association turn into a
presumption of something else. At what point do we say no to future
demands that protected-group status be accorded to employees based
on political and controversial systems of belief, physical
appearance (the “looksism” issue), family responsibilities, résumé
gaps because of unemployment or other reasons, or use of lawful
products or engagement in lawful activities in off hours—to name
just a few of the areas that in fact have been the subject of
real-world agitation in recent years? If we say yes to all, we
introduce a new presumption—familiar from the prevailing labor law
in parts of Europe—that no employer should be free to terminate or
take other “adverse action” against an employee without being
prepared to show good cause to a judge. That is exactly the goal of
some thinkers on the Left, but it should appall believers in a free
economy.

That’s reason enough to oppose ENDA, as I see it.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center jumped on the news
that the alleged gunman at last week’s Los Angeles Airport shooting
possessed “anti-government” literature. But you might be surprised
at how Potok describes
the critics of the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs:

The TSA, short for the Transportation Security
Administration, is an agency of the DHS charged with ensuring the
security of transportation, most notably air transportation.
Although it has not been widely singled out by Patriots, it has
been subjected to criticism by far-right homophobes, among others,
who have alleged that TSA agents engaging in hand searches are
really sexually groping travelers.

So: “far-right homophobes, among others.” Among others, yes.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center jumped on the news
that the alleged gunman at last week’s Los Angeles Airport shooting
possessed “anti-government” literature. But you might be surprised
at how Potok describes
the critics of the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs:

The TSA, short for the Transportation Security
Administration, is an agency of the DHS charged with ensuring the
security of transportation, most notably air transportation.
Although it has not been widely singled out by Patriots, it has
been subjected to criticism by far-right homophobes, among others,
who have alleged that TSA agents engaging in hand searches are
really sexually groping travelers.

So: “far-right homophobes, among others.” Among others, yes.

• Pakistan’s interior minister
  says the killing of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban has
  effectively ended the attempt at a peace process in the country.
  Meanwhile,
  according to a new book on the Obama Administration, President
  Obama bragged to aides that he was “really good at killing
  people”.
• The intelligence services of France, Germany, Spain and Sweden
  have
  reportedly been working together with the United Kingdom’s GCHQ
  on developing methods to conduct mass surveillance of Internet and
  telephone communications. GCHQ and the NSA have been criticized for
  those practices in part by some of the political leaders in the
  European countries whose intelligence services they have been
  cooperating with.
• The White House and top lawmakers in Congress continue to
  
  reject calls for clemency for Edward Snowden, whose disclosures
  have revealed the breadth of the NSA’s mass surveillance
  programs.
• John Kerry
  went to Egypt to tell Egyptians that democracy brings
  stability, which brings jobs, as part of his call for the violence
  in the country to stop. Meanwhile, the former president, Mohammed
  Morsi, claimed
  in front of the court where he is on trial that the case against
  him was illegitimate as he remained the country’s legitimate
  president.
• The White House
  denies Barack Obama considered dumping Joe Biden as his running
  mate for the 2012 election.
• Rep. Mike Michaud, who is running for governor of Maine in
  2014, has come out
  as gay.
• Paul Ciancia has been
  charged with the murder of a TSA agent in last week’s shooting
  at the Los Angeles International Airport.
• An attorney for the mayor of Toronto has called on
  the city’s police department to release a video alleged to show
  Mayor Bob Ford smoking crack. His attorney says it shows no such
  thing.

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Keith Speights at The Motley Fool outlines
“3
Huge Differences Between the Medicare Part D and Obamacare
Launches.” As most of us have been lectured by admin officials
and supporters of the president’s health plan, don’t you know that
the prescription drug plan rolled out by the Bush administration in
the mid-Aughts also had a terrible launch? And now, would you
believe it, the seniors who get nearly free drugs from Part D
love the program!

It sure did, but Speights stresses that the sheer magnitude of
the technical difficulties, the centrality of the website to the
program’s success, and the incentives for the targeted audience to
sign up are very different this time around.
Read the whole article for details, but on that last point:

Medicare Part D launched with several incentives for seniors to
enroll: new benefits they didn’t have before, low premiums, and
subsidies for individuals with low incomes. There was even a
penalty for enrolling late — although none for declining to
enroll.

Similar incentives are also present with Obamacare. A big
difference, though, is that many individuals could find
it more
financially attractive to forgo insurance — especially in
the first year or two. And because the health-reform
legislation didn’t
give the IRS any real teeth to go after those who don’t
want to pay the penalties, the “stick” of Obamacare probably won’t
look too threatening to some Americans not enticed by the “carrot”
of health insurance.

Let me add one striking – and awful -similarity to the two
programs: They are both unnecessary and expensive. 

There’s no question that recipients of drugs under Medicare Part
D love the program.
Something like nine out of 10 seniors say so. Why wouldn’t
they? They got $62
billion of free and/or reduced-price drugs under the program in
2010 and that number will bounce up to $150 billion by 2019!
Billion! None of which was paid for by any sort of dedicated
revenue stream at the time of the legislation’s passage. You, me,
and our great-grandkids are the stream! No one it feels like it’s
raining!

And before anyone starts yammering on about seniors choosing
between Purina Cat Chow and a generic statin (as folks such as Al
Gore did back in
the 2000 campaign), remember that when the plan was being
discussed, retirees paid on average a total of 3.2 percent of their
annual income on drugs. That was less than they shelled out on
entertainment.

Rather than, I don’t know, creating a
smaller, targeted plan that might cover low-income/low-wealth
seniors and other poor people regardless of age, Republicans and
Democrats came up with a sop to one of the most powerful and
wealthy voting blocs in the country. Many Democrats voted against
the prescription drug plan because it wasn’t paid for, which at
least was to their credit
at the time. But it’s appalling spectacle to see both parties
now touting a giveaway that wasn’t necessary in the first place and
whose cost will more than double in less than a decade as some sort
of model of anything except stupidity and wastefulness in
action.

Which brings us to Obamacare, whose cost estimate for its first
full decade had doubled even before this awful Healtcare.gov
apparition appeared. As Peter Suderman
noted in 2012, the Congressional Budget Office figures that
instead of boasting a gross operating cost of just (!) $938 billion
for its first decade, the tab for the first decade of actual
coverage is looking closer to $1.76 trillion. Who would have
thought that a government health care plan might have been more
expensive than originally claimed?
Only anyone who actually tracks what past reforms ended up
costing.

Then there’s Obamacare’s great failure when it comes to insuring
the uninsured (let’s leave aside the question of whether insurance,
spending on health care, and actual health outcomes are clearly
related,
which they are not). Of the 50 million folks that don’t have
insurance, Obamacare will, under its most optimistic projections
cover an additional 25 million over the next decade. And it will
leave
31 million uninsured over the same time frame.

When it comes to universal coverage, then, Obamacare is
an-out-of-the-box failure that needs to go back into the box and
stay there. Then we might start a conversation about
what insurance is actually to supposed to do and build a
consensus around how best to design a law that might actually work
and doesn’t just massively increase government’s power and spending
to no clear end.

15-second video, starring Barack Obama, Kathleen
Sebelius, and Mr. T: Time to bring in the A-Team? It’s
always time to bring in The A-Team.

When it was enacted in 2010, Obamacare was
supposed to be the final culmination of 60 years of effort by
Democrats to realize the dream of universal health insurance. It
was a complicated scheme, designed in such a way as to bridge the
gap among Americans of different ideologies on how to address an
alleged evil. But dreams are rarely easy to bring into reality,
especially when one person’s dream is another’s nightmare. As Steve
Chapman points out, Republicans have advocated their own costly and
burdensome programs in the past, but Obamacare has generated no
national consensus. As a result, the battle over the scheme is
unlikely to end anytime soon.

View this article.