In a troubling op-ed, Fareed Zakaria discusses how colleges are no longer acting as a conduit for social mobility. Rather than accepting the best and the brightest, colleges rely on middling upper-middle class students who are able to pay full tuition and athletes who are able to bring revenues to the universities for their performances on the field. As a result, fewer qualified poor and disadvantaged students are populating that halls of higher education.
Remembering…or More Importanly… Not Forgetting Sandy Hook
Last Sunday night on 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley interviewed the families of Newtown victims. Although the Newtown families have been successful in pushing for comprehensive gun control measures in Connecticut (which were signed into law last Thursday), they face Republican opposition in the Senate. Republican lawmakers, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have vowed to filibuster any gun control bills that are introduced to the Senate. Yesterday, President Obama spoke in Newtown to make what Politico calls a “last gun control push.” The President stated that a gun control filibuster is just “not right.”
iPods, Copyrights, and… Star Trek?
NPR’s Planet Money teams’s recent podcast discussed copyright law as it relates to digital music (21:18 minutes).
Secondary markets exists for most products. For instance, one can sell an old CD on eBay or Amazon. “But what about songs from your iTunes library you no longer want?”
This question came to a head in a recent case, Capitol Records, LLC v. Redigi Inc. After ReDigi developed a business model that created a secondary market for mp3s, the recording industry sued ReDigi for copyright infringement. ReDigi contended that their business plan conformed with the “first sale doctrine,” which says that once a work is sold, it is the purchaser (not the copyright owner) who owns the material object in which the work is contained.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which also quoted Star Trek along the way, wrote:
The novel question presented in this action is whether a digital music file, lawfully made and purchased, may be resold by its owner through ReDigi under the first sale doctrine. The Court determines that it cannot.
…the Court concludes that ReDigi’s service infringes Capitol’s reproduction rights under any description of the technology. ReDigi stresses that it “migrates” a file from a user’s computer to its Cloud Locker, so that the same file is transferred to the ReDigi server and no copying occurs. However, even if that were the case, the fact that a file has moved from one material object – the user’s computer – to another – the ReDigi server – means that a reproduction has occurred. Similarly, when a ReDigi user downloads a new purchase from the ReDigi website to her computer, yet another reproduction is created. It is beside the point that the original phonorecord no longer exists. It matters only that a new phonorecord has been created.
Not Brewopoly, the beloved family board game, an actual monopoly. As was noted in the inaugural post of the SLACE Archive, Anheuser-Busch InBev is attempting to purchase another beer conglomerate–Grupo Modelo. That Planet Money story used the attempted purchase as a predicate for discussing the economic effects of monopolies. This story, on All Things Considered (11:30 minutes), discusses the economic battle between big beer and craft brewers and how many of the hip craft beers you think you are drinking are really owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Special thanks to Jack Foster for bringing this story to my attention.
In a star studded video, Funny or Die presents, “Prop 8 — The Musical,” featuring Jack Black, Neil Patrick Harris, Craig Robinson, Lake Bell, Rashida Jones, Kathy Najimy, John C Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Allison Janney, Margaret Cho, Andy Richter, and Sarah Chalke. I know that this video is several years old, but in the wake of Hollingsworth v. Perry, it remains relevant. The video runs just over three minutes.