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May 2008
The Ninth Conference of the Parties (COP) concluding today in Bonn, Germany may signal an important mind-shift in the workings of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an organization of some 190 countries that in the past has been called "a trade treaty negotiated by environmentalists."
For a time, it appeared that CBD COP (Ministerial) decisions with important economic ramifications were taken in isolation from practical considerations of how to move from the negotiation room to the marketplace, diminishing the impact of key policies and causing frustration all the way around. There was a feeling that the CBD was not a forum that was "open for business." To be blunt, it was simply not sustainable for CBD Members to tackle the nature and magnitude of current biodiversity challenges in isolation from the market. It is increasingly critical for business to be mainstreamed into CBD discussions, and we have seen exactly that trend in recent years.
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Dear Scott,
I’m neither a partisan defender nor partisan critic of the Bush administration, so the various revelations and accusations in your book are of insufficient interest for me to rush out and buy it.
I am, however, a defender of Christianity and a seminary graduate, so you definitely got my attention by claiming that our shared Christian faith was a primary motivation for writing your book.
As I’m sure you know, Galatians 5:22-23 enumerates the various virtues which are to characterize the lives and actions of Christians:
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
Scott, I’m wondering: Which of these Christian virtues motivated that you write your book?
Love? Joy? Peace? No, I don’t think it could have been any of those. Patience? Read More...
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H.R. 1201, the ill-named “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship” (FAIR USE) Act, is the latest attempt to unravel the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), while taking the Supreme Court’s unanimous Grokster decision and recent U.S. trade treaties down with it in a single piece of legislation.
As “Still Bad: A Critique of the Latest Attempt to Gut the DMCA” notes, the bill has little to do with “freedom,” “innovation,” “revitalizing entrepreneurship,” or even “fair use.”
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The excesses of capitalism are things like too many flavors of ice cream.
The excesses of the other systems are things like genocide, gulags, and repression.
I'll take the excesses of capitalism, thank you. Read More...
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Want to Save an Endangered Species?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says then let people eat it.
The author of a new book makes an unusual claim: If you want to save an endangered species, whether plant or animal, people have to eat it.
That’s right; you “save” the endangered plant or animal by harvesting or killing it for food.
Author and ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhon’s point is that when people like to eat something, they take extra steps to ensure the product’s available.
We call it the “tragedy of the commons,” after the way people ignored public areas like parks. Economists say it all boils down to private property rights.
When people can own property, including plants and animals, they will strive to ensure its continued existence because they have a personal interest in doing so.
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In a new op/ed, IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara says when it comes to reviving the economy, “future deficits are not the real fiscal problem,” but the real problem is “runaway big government and massive federal spending growth.”
An excerpt: "Current official U.S. government projections show that without fundamental reforms, federal spending will soar over the next three decades from 20% of GDP today, where it has been relatively stable for over 50 years now, to close to 40% of GDP. The major drivers of this spending explosion are precisely the major entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
If anything even close to that happens, limited government conservatives will have been completely routed. Add in state and local spending, and total government spending in America will be over 50% of GDP. Read More...
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Talk show host Rush Limbaugh quotes IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara from a new op/ed featured on American Spectator online: “The Strategy of the Smart Surrender.”
During his show, Limbaugh discussed the premise of the piece and how more and more conservatives are yielding to the left in the battle of ideas.
“So what we have here, there was a great piece, Peter Ferrara in the American Spectator last week writing in this case about David Frum, who is a conservative commentator and author, writer, National Review Online. Read More...
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Boston University economists Lawrence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson have a study for The National Bureau of Economic Research that asserts that our average marginal tax rate, when all taxes are included, is about 40 percent.
Regardless of income!
Dallas Morning News business columnist Scott Burns points out that’s not the average tax rate, but the average marginal rate (i.e., on each additional dollar earned).
And so Burns says, “What we have is a bumpy flat tax.”
To prove his point, he uses the example of a self-employed person with annual income above $31,850 because that person has to pay both the 15.3 Social Security and Medicare payroll tax and a 25 percent federal income tax, for a total of 40.3 percent. And that doesn’t include sales taxes, state income taxes, property taxes and a host of other taxes.
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In a new op/ed featured in the Atlantic Community, George Pieler and Jens Laurson discuss how market manipulation and the craze over biofuels have led to a growing international food crisis.
An excerpt:
Soaring prices for widely-traded (and subsidized) commodities like rice, corn, soy, - the bedrock of the global food supply, have created a short-term, we hope, hunger crisis. For the poorest of the poor, food is becoming too expensive. For the most insular and corrupt governments, food aid is a vital instrument of political control or, in sunnier dictatorships, a powerful tool in public relations.
High prices usually mean goods are scarce and demand is high, and there seems to be broad consensus that one factor is demand in the rising economies of Asia (China, India), as well as parts of Latin America, and even Russia. Read More...
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George Pieler and Jens F. Laurson are featured this week in the Alabama Press-Register discussing defense contracts and earmarks in “Competition Ensured the Selection of the Best Quality Tanker.”
Reps. John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi and Todd Tiahrt all want to give Boeing the contract for refueling tankers the Air Force awarded to a Northrop Grumman-Airbus partnership. Protecting local (Boeing) jobs is a classic congressional move, but this time there's an extra dimension: an attack on international trade and a presidential-campaign hit on John McCain.
Sen. McCain is accused, by the Financial Times, among others, of self-interest, because some of his campaign team lobbied for the Northrop Grumman bid. That may look bad, but McCain has a long history with this particular contract.
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Any glimmer of respect I might have had for our lawmakers was extinguished with their condescending and “holier-than-thou” treatment of the big five oil executives at the “Oil Inquisition” on Wednesday.
The abuse cannot be portrayed well in print, but the session began with Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont asking “How much money did you make last year?”
Charles Shumer of New York grilled Vice Chairman Peter Robertson of Chevron regarding Chevron’s activities in Burma. When Robertson admitted that Chevron had committed $2 million in aid to the cyclone victims, Shumer had the audacity to respond, “Do you think they could use a lot more than $2 million?”
OK Comrade Shumer, how much do you want us to give? How much will you MAKE us give? But wait a minute…then it’s not “giving” is it? How much have YOU given? How much has the government been successful in giving? Read More...
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While we have pointed out the many positive impacts of trade during “World Trade Week,” we should not overlook the growing and increasingly dangerous global trade in illicit goods. Everything that is good in legitimate global trade has its equal and opposite component in the huge flow of pirated and counterfeit goods that traverse the globe every second.
This problem has hit the headlines recently in the U.S.
- Instances of fake and adulterated health care products and toys has sensitized the broader population to potential (and actual) damage imposed by illicit trade.
- And a recent major seizure of counterfeit Cisco routers by U.S. law enforcement officials adds an extra layer of concern, since there is speculation that some of these counterfeit products (all from China) were sold to sensitive U.S. government and military offices.
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There was an interesting exchange at a reception held in Geneva this week by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA).
A Q&A session ensued after presentations on the challenges of developing and distributing medicines for neglected diseases by Dr. Chris Hentschel, President and CEO of Medicines for Malaria Venture, Dr. Bernard Pecoul, Executive Director, Drug for Neglected Diseases Initiative and Dr. Paul Herrling, Head of Corporate Research for Novartis.
Jamie Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, asked whether the panel supported the (his) proposal for replacing the current structure of IP-based innovation and development with some mix of a global R&D fund and prize structure for new medicines.
Several good points where made, all of which cast doubt on Love’s proposals. Read More...
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IPI senior fellow George Pieler is featured today in American Spectator online with a new op/ed: “No New Wireless Taxes.”
In the piece, Pieler writes:
The Wall Street Journal gives credit to Sen. McCain for trying to protect consumers from excessive, confusing, and duplicate taxes on wireless communications, aka mobile phone service. While Mr. McCain must share the credit with Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Chris Cannon, he was indeed the first to press for a halt in the states' shameless milking of your cell phone bill. His Cell Phone Tax Moratorium Act, introduced in January, proposes a three-year moratorium on new cell phone taxes that unduly burden wireless consumers, compared with other communications services.
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Google co-founder Larry Page today demonstrated that either he can't think logically, or that he can stare an audience straight in the eyes and lie to them.
At an event sponsored by Google's New America Foundation, Page said that while a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo would "concentrate too much power in the online communications market, stifling innovation and curbing competition", a deal between the two search giants Google and Yahoo would not.
You read that right. If the two leading search engines decide to start dominating the market in a coordinated fashion, that should pose no antitrust issues, according to Page. But if a company that is doing poorly at search (Microsoft) made a deal with one of the two leading search engines, somehow that should keep antitrust regulators up at night.
So we learned something about Larry Page. But we also learned something today about the New America Foundation. Read More...
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Ask what is the biggest impediment to widespread, multilateral trade agreements and the answer is likely to be . . . agriculture. Even purportedly free-trade advocates, once elected to high office, get sweaty palms when it comes to agricultural subsidies.
And even though food prices are soaring and both the developed and developing countries are crying foul, don’t expect the politicians to see their anti-free trade policies as the culprit.
The villains, depending to whom you listen, are: globalization, China, bio-fuels or price-gouging commodity traders—but never protectionist agricultural policies. And the mother of all such policies is the European Union’s “Common Agricultural Policy” (CAP), which eats up nearly half the EU’s $70 billion annual budget.
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The World Health Assembly in Geneva is this week’s forum for those seeking to roll back incentives for innovation and strip away the value of intellectual property.
As predicted, a range of activist NGOs (non-governmental organizations) were back to pick up on a battle against intellectual property that had delivered them some notable setbacks in recent weeks. These setbacks include the election of Frances Gurry to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization and a recent meeting of the World Health Organization’s Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property that failed to embrace their agenda of targeting the global patent system. But the anti-IP crowd is already flying in the face of established trade policies, decades of proven innovation models and a proliferation of expansive programs by the private sector to provide access to medicines, so a couple recent losses are probably not that big of a deal. Read More...
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For most of the postwar era there was a consensus on the social and economic benefits of trade. Then a new antitrade conventional wisdom emerged, primarily among a handful of vocal critics.
There are (at least) two anti-free trade arguments, though, ironically, they are somewhat antithetical. One says that the free trade hurts developed countries; the other says it hurts developing countries.
The first argument claims that workers in poor countries steal jobs from workers in rich countries. Nonsense! In a voluntary contract, both the seller and the buyer benefit.
These same critics buy goods and services every day for personal use, and they don’t claim they are being robbed by sellers who are doing a job they (the buyers) should be doing. Trade between countries is no different than trade between people, except on a larger scale.
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A new op/ed by IPI senior fellow George Pieler and International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens F. Laurson published in Forbes.com discusses how the tentacles of pork-barrel politics are reaching into U.S. defense contracts.
An excerpt: Bipartisanship is rearing its ugly head in Congress.
Reps. John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi and Todd Tiahrt all want to give Boeing the contract for refueling tankers the Air Force awarded to a Northrop Grumman-Airbus partnership. Protecting local (Boeing) jobs is a classic congressional move, but this time there's an extra dimension: an attack on international trade and a presidential-campaign hit on John McCain.
Sen. McCain is accused, by the Financial Times, among others, of self-interest, because some of his campaign team lobbied for the Northrop Grumman bid. That may look bad, but McCain has a long history with this particular contract. Read More...
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Will We Never Be Rid of Jimmy Carter’s Disastrous Policies?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says bad ideas never seem to die.
The oil companies are making record profits, and both Democratic presidential candidates say they want to take some of those profits away.
Their solution: reviving one of Jimmy Carter’s worst policies—the 1980 windfall profits tax on oil companies.
At the time, the Washington Post correctly said that the windfall profits tax was simply a tax on oil production, not oil companies.
The tax raised the price of American-produced oil, making foreign oil cheaper by comparison. So the U.S. produced less and bought more oil from overseas, which means the new tax never created the revenue politicians had predicted.
Republicans like to vie for the mantle of the Ronald Reagan candidate. Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed featured today in National Review Online, Peter Ferrara dubs the congressman from Wisconsin Paul ‘Roosevelt’ Ryan for his innovative reforms to end the long-term entitlement crisis.
Ferrara writes: They said it couldn’t be done. But Congressman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has just done it. Ryan is the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. This morning, Ryan will introduce legislation providing for a package of comprehensive reforms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that will completely eliminate the long-term entitlement crisis, without tax increases. Since the early 1950s, federal spending has been relatively stable at around 20 percent of GDP. But official projections now show that over the next 35 years, this will soar to close to 40 percent, primarily due to the big three entitlement programs. Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed published today in American Spectator online, IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara writes:
I had a little argument with David Frum about taxes almost two years ago in a series of blog exchanges. He had argued that to pay for abolishing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) we should adopt a carbon tax of equivalent size. The AMT had been adopted in the 1960s as a way of ensuring that a couple of dozen millionaires exploiting loopholes so furiously that they avoided any income tax liability altogether would be forced to pay some reasonable amount of tax.
But the AMT had never been indexed for inflation. So now, 40 years later, the AMT threatens millions of Americans with a punitive tax that would raise close to a trillion dollars over 10 years. It threatens in particular those in higher tax, Democrat states, as the deductions for state and local taxes are disallowed under the AMT. Read More...
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Remember a couple of weeks ago when Francis Gurry won by a single vote over Brazil's candidate for the next Director General of WIPO?
Well, apparently, Brazil isn't going to take the results of a democratic vote sitting down.
From Geneva, we hear that Brazil has suddenly become noticeably contentious at the World Health Assembly, where delegates are trying to finish drafting language that came out of the IGWG process related to intellectual property and medical innovation.
In fact, the dynamic has been described to me as Brazil challenging virtually every proposal that the U.S. offers up, and that the discussions have been reduced to a U.S. vs. Brazil match. Reportedly, the E.U. and Canada have stated that they find Brazil's tactics troubling.
Speculation is that Brazil is trying to get back at the U.S. for engineering a successful vote for Gurry.
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The theory of free trade is based on the idea of comparative advantage. In a nutshell, it says that people do well when they do what they do best and buy everything else from others. Indeed, that’s the hallmark of economic advancement.
This idea has been the basis of trade policy throughout the modern era, with its chief expositors being the British political economist Adam Smith and statesman Richard Cobden.
Empirical data consistently show that trade between nations has helped to achieve significant economic gains in those nations that have embraced it, and especially in the United States.
But in the U.S., the belief that trade between nations benefits both parties has recently come under assault.
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Last Friday, President George W. Bush closed the week with a proclamation:
“NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim May 18 through May 24, 2008, as World Trade Week. I encourage all Americans to observe this week with events, trade shows, and educational programs that celebrate the benefits of trade to our Nation and the global economy.”
We at the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) think there are few things more important to economic growth than the free-trade economy. And so, in keeping with the president’s proclamation, we intend to recognize World Trade Week by publishing a daily “TradeByte” discussing some aspect of trade policy.
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I recently reviewed the case of Atlantic Recording v. Howell for DRMWatch.
The coverage of this case by many journalists and bloggers has been extremely silly. Take this story by Richard Korman, entitled Court Ruling Could End P2P Music-Download Lawsuits,citing the author of the Recording Industry v. the People blog Ray Beckerman.
Simply put, the prediction that this will mean the end of such suits is flat out wrong. Most courts have not relied on the "making available" theory to find liability. In the future, if the case is followed by other courts (possible, but unlikely), it simply means that the plaintiff copyright owners will produce somewhat more evidence--something they Read More...
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In a new op/ed, IPI senior fellow George Pieler and International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens F. Laurson discuss Zimbabwe's recent election in which Robert Mugabe has yet again attempted to manipulate the results in his favor.
In the piece, "Let Hope Not Blind Us To Mugabe's Ruthlessness," the authors warn the international community should not underestimate Mugabe's next move, and suggest policies friends of the country should embrace in order to help the people of the African nation.
An excerpt:
“HOPE springs eternal. For Zimbabweans, it is the only way to remain sane and civil in a country so thoroughly ruined by the ineptitude, corruption, and racial hatred stirred up by Robert Mugabe and his cronies. Read More...
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The IP-skeptic activist groups took it on the chin last week, as their plans for socializing the intellectual property (IP) system hit a setback.
For those of you new to the IP policy battles, several activist NGOs (non-governmental organizations) with a socialist worldview are trying to undermine the international IP system, as they see intellectual property as a public good, something that belongs to the entire public—regardless of who invents it or who pays for the development of that IP.
And so for several years they have worked within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in an effort to weaken IP standards, especially on pharmaceuticals.
Their argument, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is that pharmaceutical patents undermine access to needed drugs in poor countries. Read More...
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In October of 2006, I was privileged to participate as a plenary speaker at a high-level Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) conference organized by the State of Maharashtra on the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Biotechnology (BT) as a vehicle for growth in Pune, India. At the IT-BT Conference, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Vilas Rao Deshmukh, awarded lifetime achievement awards to individuals who had dedicated their careers to doing one thing, and doing it extremely well, for a period of 30 years or more, including, among others, the eminent former head of the Indian Council for Science and Research, Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, Read More...
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Good news! At least for all rational, right-thinking persons.
Recent days have seen two very encouraging events in some of the international fora where radical anti-IP activists have been trying to derail the intellectual property system. The radicals have experienced two major setbacks in their attempts to take advantage of tensions between developed and developing economies and use those tensions to further their radical anti-IP agenda.
Their most recent setback was yesterday's election of Francis Gurry to be the next Director General of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. Gurry was the chose of those nations who actually materially participate in the IP system, registering patents, creating and inventing things, and trying to share their creations with the rest of the world through trade.
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Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says wait until you see what government employees are doing.
While millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet, some federal employees have found a solution: charge it to the taxpayers.
A new government report says that over a 15-month investigation, nearly $6 billion in credit card charges didn’t follow proper procedures. It’s easy to see why. According to the report:
- Postal workers charged more than $14,000 for Internet dating services.
- Four Pentagon employees charged $77,000 in clothing to high-end stores.
- And one State Department worker charged $360 for women’s lingerie, but claimed it was for jungle training in Ecuador.
While most federal employees are honest, some apparently can’t control themselves when they have access to other peoples’ money. Read More...
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IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara will appear tomorrow morning on the BizRadio Network’s “Mike Norman Show” to discuss the impact the government’s economic stimulus checks will have on the economy, and what the keys are to get America booming again. Tune in to listen to the discussion Thursday morning live at 8:20 am EST/7:20 am CST.
In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, tune in to 1360 AM. In the Houston area, go to 1110 AM. For all other areas, or to listen online, click here.
To read Peter’s op/ed on Forbes.com, “Let’s Get America Booming Again,” click here.
We welcome your feedback on the discussion.
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You’ve probably heard of the “No New Taxes” pledge. Well, how about a “No Tech Taxes” pledge.
It looks like that’s where presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain is heading.
McCain has fought against (primarily) state efforts to impose Internet access taxes and to illegitimately require vendors to collect sales taxes, much to the chagrin of the states, which see the Internet as a new treasure trove of revenue.
Access taxes are those that would be added to your Internet service provider (ISP) bill that gives you access to the Internet. And the sales taxes would be collected whether appropriate or not when you buy a product or service online. Congress has so far successfully managed to fight off attempts to impose or expand those taxes, but the reprieves have been temporary—and hard to secure.
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Today is the day when the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) elects its new Director General.
If you think WIPO matters, then of course the leader of WIPO matters, so within international IP circles, this is a big deal.
Ideally, you would have someone who is not only free of corruption, but also someone who at least thinks intellectual property is an important concept. You might think that anyone who is a candidate for the DG position at WIPO would think IP was important, but you would be wrong, at least about several of the candidates.
In a very short time, in the process of a straw poll and then a couple of rounds of voting, the list of candidates has shrunk from 15 to three. Right now it's down to Francis Gurry (Australia), Masood Kahn (Pakistan), and José Graça Aranha (Brazil).
At the last vote, Gurry had 26 votes, Kahn 13, and Aranha 18. But that was before twelve of the candidates dropped out, Read More...
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In a new op/ed published by the Heartland Institute, IPI senior fellow George Pieler and International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens Laurson say when it comes to job competition in the marketplace, “It's not a matter of ‘outsourcing America’ but ‘insourcing productive labor,’ finding the most rational way to utilize the best ideas and talent for America to compete in the global marketplace.”
An excerpt:
One facet of the immigration debate has seldom been controversial but is now unnecessarily unsettled because of politics and the nation's economic situation. That's the issue of tailoring U.S. immigration law to the nation's critical workforce needs by granting better accommodation to well-educated foreign-born workers skilled in high-tech industries.
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IPI senior research fellow Chris Israel is featured today with a new op/ed on Forbes.com, entitled, “Managing Against Illegal Content.”
In the op/ed, Israel discusses the recent Comcast/BitTorrent agreement and how the market-based resolution also offers better solutions to protecting intellectual property online.
An excerpt:
”Now we have a chance to manage against illegal content on the Web.
Indeed, the recent announcement made by Comcast and BitTorrent that they will work together to find a market-based solution to the network management challenges posed by the huge bandwidth demands of peer-to-peer file sharing is positive on two fronts.
First, as FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell pointed out in his response to the announcement, it clearly demonstrates that the market is truly the best vehicle for finding solutions to problems in a rapidly changing digital environment.
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Should Internet application providers be liable for illegal material such as pornography, copyright violations and civil rights infractions that pass through their “pipes” or through their service?
The general principle has been that, so long as the provider passively allows traffic to flow through and does not look at or interact with the material, that provider exists within a “safe harbor” and is not legally liable.
But how passive is passive enough? This question is now in the weeds with recent decisions concerning civil rights and interactive web services like craigslist.
Craigslist, the Seventh Circuit ruled in March of 2008, is passive enough for the Communications Decency Act (CDA), in Chicago Lawyers v. Craigslist Read More...
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As a collector of arguments for and against intellectual property, I find that behind the rhetorical flourishes about monopoly and property, a good many of them turn on premises about empirical reality that are difficult to check. One subset (con) concerns enforcement costs--for nontangibles, these tend to be on the high side, especially in the digital age. Another subset (pro) concerns overall benefits. The difficulty is, how do we know what would have happened if the law being assessed had not been passed?
Studies that compare one country with other otherwise similarly situated countries help. So do studies that compare countries "before" and "after." Here is a recent, comprehensive effort issued under the auspices of the OECD:
Strengthening of Intellectual Property Rights in Developing Countries", OECD Trade Policy Working Papers, No. 62, OECD Read More...
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Is It Time for a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says only if we want a strong economy.
The key to an individual’s economic success is being able to sell what you have to others, whether it’s products or your time. And being able to buy what you need at the best available price.
That’s also the key to a country’s economic success.
So why do so many Democrats oppose what’s known as free trade agreements with other countries, especially Colombia?
Colombians pay tariffs, or taxes, on about 8 percent of what they sell to the U.S.
Americans, by contrast, pay tariffs of up to 37 percent on nearly all of the products we sell to Colombia.
Those tariffs make U.S. products more expensive and harder to sell. A free trade agreement would end that disparity.
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A few weeks ago, we wrote about France’s expansion of its champagne region to sate the discerning palates of nouveau-riche Chinese and Indian consumers.
It gets better. In addition to brow-beating international producers of sparkling wine into giving up the commercially valuable “champagne” label, now France is going after use of the “de Champagne” label in Champagne, Switzerland, even for biscuits sold under the brand since the 1930’s. No joke.
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While news reports of ExxonMobil's $10 billion first quarter profits sound enormous, for a company the size of ExxonMobil, it's actually not so large a number. In fact, ExxonMobil's profit margins have been falling, which is why Wall Street was disappointed and ExxonMobil's stockprice fell.
But ExxonMobil's falling profit margins are still too much for Washington, it seems, where some Democrats think the company’s making too much.
Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey said last week, “Big oil is spending their profits to prop up their stock price rather than on discovering and delivering alternatives to $4 gas.”
One “alternative” to $4-per-gallon gas is to increase the domestic supply. But Mr. Markey and most of his Democratic colleagues have opposed virtually all efforts to open up more domestic drilling. Read More...
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In a new article today discussing New York attorney general Mario Cuomo’s proposal of a bill to put the heat on film pirates, Variety cites IPI’s 2006 study, “The True Cost of Motion Picture Piracy to the U.S. Economy.”
An excerpt:
At a press conference Monday morning in Gotham, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo held up a pirated "Iron Man" DVD to introduce legislation for harsher penalties with the Piracy Protection Act. "The movie 'Iron Man' came out, on Friday. This is already a bootleg stolen copy of 'Iron Man.' It was in the theaters this weekend, it's already been stolen, and it's already being distributed," Cuomo said. Cuomo was joined by NBC U prexy-CEO Jeff Zucker, several industry members, state senators and "Baby Mama" thesp and Gothamite Tina Fey. Read More...
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A bill has been introduced to set up the creation of a free nationwide wireless network by auctioning off a significant piece of available spectrum to the highest bidder who agrees to provide service on those terms.
How many ways is this idea likely to have some undesirable consequences? Let's see how many I can list just off the top of my head.
1) One obvious problem the bill's sponsors have already thought of and taken care of; that is the problem of a free network's being swamped by adult content. The bill stipulates that the network is also supposed to come with filters to protect those underage from obscene or indecent content. (Note: the reference to "indecency" folds in the FCC's broad censorship rules for radio/TV, which have, among other things, been used to punish a station for airing James Joyce and the word "penis" in song).
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Here in Geneva at the World Health Organization’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, there is a really bad idea floating around.
There is a small group of neo-Marxist activists who don’t like intellectual property (IP). Having lost the Marxist battle against real property rights many years ago, these neo-Marxists carry on the fight against intellectual property.
In essence they want to eliminate the economic incentives—the heart of capitalism—that propel individuals and companies to innovate and create, primarily because they see economic incentives as evil. In Geneva, that IP angst manifests itself in the loathing of patents.
Oh, they won’t say exactly that, but that’s what they mean.
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Author: Susan Finston || Location: Bonn, Germany