Obama picks RIAA's favorite lawyer for a top Justice post. As had already been pointed out

Campaign rhetoric aside, this should be no surprise. Obama's selection of Joe Biden as vice president showed that the presidential hopeful was comfortable with someone with firmly pro-RIAA views. Biden urged the criminal prosecutions of copyright-infringing peer-to-peer users and tried to create a new federal felony involving playing unauthorized music.

From link here

A year ago, the Oregon Department of Transportation announced it had demonstrated that a new way to pay for roads via a mileage tax and satellite technology could work.

Now Gov. Ted Kulongoski says he'd like the legislature to take the next step.

As part of a transportation-related bill he has filed for the 2009 legislative session, the governor says he plans to recommend "a path to transition away from the gas tax as the central funding source for transportation."

Let's see. There are two alternatives here for increasing revenue in the face of more fuel efficient vehicles: 1. raise the gas tax. 2. introduce a complicated vehicle tracking technology to have a mileage tax. Disadvantages of the mileage tax:

**encourages gas guzzling vehicles - check

**raises serious privacy concerns - check

**probably won't work that well - check

**reduces the user fee on heavy vehicles that impose more wear and tear on the highway - check

What are the advantages exactly?

Update: you can find a bit more information here. One possible benefit of the new system is it could be used to implement congestion charges - mileage charges that depend on traffic or time of day. However, that doesn't seem to be the plan.

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the Villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, Since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars. They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys! Now you have a better understanding of how the WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WILL WORK !!!!

Glenn Thorpe brings to our attention an article by Matt Zimmerman about the Google settlement with the book authors. He points out that until now Google has pursued legal settlements that benefited everyone; this time the settlement benefits only them, leaving anyone else who would like to make fair use of copyright material in the lurch.

We argue a lot about patents on this blog. While software patents are pretty clearly harmful, for the most part they aren't enforced so don't make much difference. The big blockade to innovation these days seems to be the copyright tail wagging our dog.