Dan Mitchell reports in the New York Times that Lawrence Lessig is shifting his focus to combat the influence of money on politics, which yields bad laws and not just the bad laws governing intellectual property link here. Lessig himself is in print link here and he has a YouTube posted link here . "Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide," he wrote in his blog. "In the United States, listening to money is the only way to secure re-election. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars."

June 9's edition of the Economist has several interesting articles concerning IP. A short one discusses how Skype, podcasts, and broadband have transformed teaching of foreign languages link here. With Skype, you can get a native speaker on line to correct your mispronunciation, at native wages. With podcasts, you have the language lesson recorded, and can listen and repeat while driving or gardening or what have you. Broadband makes access to both really cheap.

Having struggled learning several languages myself, this is the most flexible and attractive development I've heard of. It still depends on doing the work though, so you have to want to learn it.

Via Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, Paul Graham has an interesting blog post from last April (link here) arguing that Microsoft has lost the software applications war to Google and other Web 2.0 software start-ups. While this may be something of an overstatement, the heart of Graham's argument is an open source software application known as Ajax. The "x" in Ajax stands for the XMLHttpRequest object, which allows a web browser to communicate with a server in the background, rather than simply by requesting that the server send a new page. Anyone who uses Google's GMail service has seen this bit of software at work, checking for new messages, notifying the user when a new message arrives, and automatically refreshing the inbox message list to display new messages. Other Google applications using this technology include their online word processing and spreadsheet applications.

The Ajax application manages this behind the scenes communication between browser and server, enabling the kind of applications which used to run from the desktop to run in any web browser. To the extent that applications migrate from individual desktops to the web, the role of the computer operating system becomes less and less important. Given Google's lead in this technology, it's hard to see how Microsoft will keep up, particularly since it requires innovating around its main product. And, the biggest irony here is that Microsoft invented the XMLHttpRequest object to let its Outlook email application work seamlessly with external mail servers.

(As an aside of no relevance to this post, there is a very cool graphical explanation of the Mobius transformations of the plane up on the Perfectly Reasonable Deviations blog.)

There's a depressing story in Sunday's (6/10) New York Times by Stephen Labaton (link here) about the Bush administration's defense of Microsoft against allegations Google has made in several state venues that the Vista operating system's desktop search feature slows down the opeartion of rival search software. It shouldn't come as a surprise that at the center of the story is yet another Bush administration Department of Justice attorney problem. Specifically, assistant attorney general Thomas O. Barnett of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, wrote a memo defending Microsoft against Google's charge that Microsoft was in violation of the consent agreement it signed in 2001 to settle the antitrust case against it.

While there's nothing specifically wrong with promoting the administration's pro-business policies, Barnett's involvement is problematic:

The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes. At the firm, Justice Department officials said, he never worked on Microsoft matters. Still, for more than a year after arriving at the department, he removed himself from the case because of conflict of interest issues. Ethics lawyers ultimately cleared his involvement.

While this probably won't become the scandal that the politicization of DOJ hiring and firing practices has, it's an excellent illustration of the problems that high level regulatory capture entails.

Daniel Gross has an interesting MoneyBox article in Slate (link here) on how the normally merger friendly Bush DOJ Antitrust Division and the FTC have decided that letting Whole Foods merge with Wild Oats (total merger value $670 million) would seriously undermine competition in the high end retail food industry.

Of course, as Gross notes:

We're in the midst of a merger mania, and the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division the agencies tasked with assuring that mergers don't harm consumers by reducing competition have approved almost every deal. If the nation's largest hog producer buys the second-largest hog producer? OK. Telecommunications giants SBC and AT&T want to merge? No problem. Giant supermarket company Albertson's and giant supermarket company SuperValu get together? You got it.

Coming up with hard evidence that decisions like this are politically motivated is obviously difficult, but Gross makes a compelling case for it. Check it out.

In today's Wall Street Journal Business World column, "Yes Logo", Holman Jenkins, Jr. writes that China's disregard of "intellectual property," such as trademarks, will cause firms to underinvest in "reputation" (his parentheses) and quality "and won't take place if they can be freely expropriated by knock-off artists."

Mr. Jenkins adduces not one iota of evidence for this remarkable claim, and ignores the fact that software firms such as Microsoft and many others continue to invest billions in producing new products and brand building. Could it be that they earn much more than their cost of capital even in the face of the rip-off artists thanks to their first mover advantages and ability to sell complementary services, not to mention their already strong postions in the market, strong brands, etc.?

So who needs intellectual property?

From Stephen Spear who correctly comments that all the IP lobbyists getting together to form one giant lobby cannot be a good thing.

Randy Barnett over at Volokh takes on the ruthless George Lucas/Star Wars Copyright Empire -

[T]he laugh is really going to be on Lucasfilm because, as we all know, people won't invest scarce time producing creative works that others want to watch without the financial incentives provided by intellectual "property" rights granted for "limited times" (i.e. in perpetuity). So it is safe to predict that no one will contribute any mashups to the new Starwars.com website. Boy, will that be embarrassing for them!

Quote of the day from Robert W. McChesney, responding to Glenn Reynolds:

Our media system is not a "free market" because it is built largely upon extraordinary government subsidies. The government has been in the middle of building our media system from the beginning. Perhaps no other industry this size has anywhere near as much direct and indirect government support and involvement. Consider the value of monopoly licenses to radio and TV channels or monopoly cable TV franchises. Or consider the value of copyright protection, a government created monopoly privilege. We are talking tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies. The list goes on and on.

I am not opposed to government subsidies. I think they are unavoidable. Like Madison and Jefferson, who instituted enormous printing and postal subsidies to spawn a vibrant press, I believe they are the price of building a democratic media culture. The problem in recent times is that the policymaking process has gotten so corrupt that the giants firms that dominate media and telecommunication give back very little in exchange for the bounty bestowed upon them. We hear a lot of PR hokum about brilliant entrepreneurs and free markets. But huge corporations like AT&T and Comcast were created based on government monopoly licenses. Their "competitive advantage" comes with owning politicians and regulators, not serving consumers. They are doing everything they can to use their domination of politicians to lock in control over the Internet, and make it their private fiefdom. They want to terminate the egalitarian genius of the Internet, Glenn, which captivates both of us. These firms would not know a free market if it kicked them in the butt.

The Federal Communications Commission faces a legacy-defining moment when in the next few weeks it decides how to auction the 60 MHz of spectrum freed up by the move of TV to high definition, according to Gigi Sohn at Public Knowledge link. She has some astute comments on the opportunity to add a third broad-band channel capable of competing with the existing duopoly of cable and DSL channels. She suggests a number of auction rules that would improve the likelihood of a competitive outcome and add substantially to the availability of cheap broadband services.