Just a link, haven’t read it, can’t comment – but if you always wanted to know what the US are fighting for, click here and find out. There’s also a comment from some (seemingly) left German academics and the American reply on that page. I’ll read and comment on it later.
The Secret War. Today: Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
When Paul Krugman stated in his NY Times op-ed column back in February that, in his opinion, in ten years people will regard the Enron induced confidence crisis in American capitalism as a much bigger problem than September 11, 2001 and the ensuing war on terror, the public outrage was immediate. I am not sure Krugman is right with his statement – we’ll have to wait for future generations of historians to rank the events – but he’s making an crucial point. Important things are going on in this world and most people, including those professionally involved with selling opinion, the media, somehow don’t get it.
What I am referring to is the war about who is allowed to benefit from a copyright on Mickey Mouse for how long after its creation. In short, the war about intellectual property rights, the fundamental distributive conflict of the digital age. Another episode in this war is going to take place in the U.S. constitutional court. I am not going to outline the Eldred vs. Ashcroft lawsuit which will be decided soon. Click on the big “e” and find out for yourself. But mark my words: The decision will affect the future of public life in Western societies deeply and possibly lastingly.
As I have argued before, current copyright holders are about to exploit the existing socially institutionalised notion of property rights in order to perpetuate legal institutions for a future in which they will likely be entirely inadequate. The problem with such institutionalised myths of rationality is that people take them for granted. And with a deeply engrained (important!) institution as property, most people will never ask any questions.
Thus, I am grateful that the list of supporters of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit (those in favour of moderate copyright extensions) includes some sort of who-is-who of famous and inflential economists, quite a few of which have been awarded the Nobel Price in Economics: George A. Akerlof, Kenneth J. Arrow, Timothy F. Bresnahan, James M. Buchanan, Ronald H. Coase, Linda R. Cohen, Milton Friedman, Jerry R. Green, Robert W. Hahn, Thomas W. Hazlett, C. Scott Hemphill, Robert E. Litan, Roger G. Noll, Richard Schmalensee, Steven Shavell, Hal R. Varian, and Richard J. Zeckhauser. One of their lawyers is Harvard’s William Fisher whose thoughts on the challenges of digital reproduction and distribution for copyright law I have already recommended.
Hopefully they will be able to have a calming influence on the panel of judges.
Again: The copyright war is a secret war. But – in my opinion – will have more important consequences for our societies than the one currently fought on the screens. So check the lawsuit’s website and help out Mickey!
FT: FDP criticizes Schroeder’s stance on Iraq
(Link) I really don’t know why the papers pay so much attention to politicians during campaign time. They really ought not to.
Wolfgang Gerhardt, the boring old possible successor of Joschka Fischer in the foreign office has given an interview. Now that is something he does not do very often since he was ousted as chairman of the FDP by Guido Westerwelle in 2001.
He’s a politician, so he probably likes media attention. And he probably wants more of it. And he thinks he will get some for criticising the chancellor for something I am pretty sure neither of both actually has: an (informed) stance on Iraq.
It’s election times, people. As a reminder, election times are those in which policy is the last thing on a politician’s mind, for the product/market diagrams his campaign staff have prepared dominate the thinking part of his/her brain. So my guess is, should they actually have an informed stance on Iraq (and I *very* much doubt that) neither of them is going to tell it to the public before the election.
Germany is a democracy. And we have tv. And one and one still adds up to two.
Art & Life Documented (for the 11th time)
Yesterday I visited “Documenta11“, one of the most important exhibitions of modern art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. As the suffix 11 indicates, this is the eleventh of such exhibitions, whose broad aim is to provide either a thematic or temporal survey of modern art and artists.
I am by no means a qualified art critic and not usually interested in mostly pseudo intellectual debates about modern art. So all I can present is my opinion and so please remember – de gustibus non disputandum est.
Well. I went to D.9 and dX in 1992 and 1997. In 1992 I was a) 17 and b) went there with about 50 people from my Gymnasium, so I only remember a huge video installation and a tower constructed from wood. My overall impression was that art had lost it completely. My impression of dX was pretty much the same, I thought it was mostly bullshit presented by pretentious and impolite pseudo intellectuals calling themselves artists (note to myself: public discussion about the definition of artist necessary). The one thing I really remember was a project to have visitors paint cubist pictures and publish them online. Oh, and yes, they had living pigs to show that, yes, life can be art, too. How enlightening.
All in all, it was so horrible I did not want to go until two weeks ago, when I met this American artist Scott (can’t remember his last name) in Berlin. Scott is predominantly painting viruses. He told me that this time, Documenta would be *really different*, exhibiting lots of stuff with a *real meaning”. So I decided to give Kassel another chance.
Today I am glad I did. Scott told the truth, most of the art exhibited does have a message. As the artistic director of D11, Okwui Enwezor, holds, the underlying theme is a cultural discourse – mostly concerned with global distributive justice and the fate of Africa.
After decades of exhibiting meaningless stuff branded “made by famous artist X”, the art exhibited in Kassel is now art which considers people, politics and society as worthy of consideration. But while I enjoyed this change in attitude, the documentary character of many exhibits will again have people ask “what is art?”
No doubt, it is more important to have people watch a documentary regarding the Hutu/Tutsi genocide than to discuss the artistic value of pigs being fed by art tourists. But the question remains – is that art?
I am not going to answer it. I don’t care, as long as I like it. And this time, for the first time, I did like the exhibition. So I will again plead “de gustibus non disputandum est” and leave the discussion to others.
Structure in motion.
Now we all know that structure is something precious in unstable times like these, don’t we?
And like some of the gold diggers during the glod rushes of earlier times were more successful than others, some people are able to identify the precious stability, the macro trends of development within which all the instability occurs. Think of a fractal image on which a micro pattern is infinitely embedded in a macro version of itself. Since our lives take place in unstable micro patterns most of us can’t see how these patterns are actually floating on much more stable macro patterns. But some can. And I think, with reference to the fractals of social development, a lot of them are interested in economic history.
You wonder what I am talking about? OK – here’s your macro pattern detection test. What does the following dialogue, taken from www.inpassing.org, August 8th, 2002, tell you about the future…
“Do you really save money by paying her to follow you around and remember what you already have in your wardrobe?”
“Well yes, because she reminds me of things like that I already have a black skirt.”
– Two women outside Berkeley Bowl (which is a grocery store, not a bowling alley, oddly enough.)
And now I recommend to compare your thoughts to Berkeley’s Brad DeLong’s.
Europe. Art. Later.
I will write something about my visit to this year’s dokumenta11 later tonight. For the time being I’ll leave you with the FT’s Quentin Peel and his thoughts about how Germany would act different in Europe under a conservative chancellor (Link).
I think most of that is bollocks. Germany is still as committed to multilateral European governance as it has always been. And there is no way I can think of for Stoiber to change that, even if he wanted to should he become the next chancellor. So the multilateral vs. inter-governmental rift will still see the UK on the one side and Germany on the other.
The new conservative French government is somewhat undecided, tending to intergovernmentalism but, in my opionion, predominantly using that position as a leverage in the negotiations with Germany about who will pick up the Common Agricultural Market bill after the EU’s enlargement.
The French famers are srtill the ones who have understood EU politics best…
Important news.
Following Steven Wolfram’s “A new kind of science“, another algorythm solving one of the oldest mathematical problems, the determination of prime numbers (those which can only be divided by one and themselves), has been discovered by Indian researchers.
Mainz 05, up-and-coming football club in Germany’s second division, yesterday beat Union Berlin on their home ground. (Link).
For all those not too familiar with the second division of the German football league, Mainz05 is my home-town club and almost ascended to the premier league last season. Now they need all the suppport they can get to make it this time around. So please stand up for the (coming) champions, for the champions stand up…
The Human Stain.
I am about to take off for a friend’s brithday party. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll get Phillip Roth’s “The Human Stain” in the original version. There is no need to praise the book here. Others have done so exhaustively and probably better than I could. So why this entry?
Because everytime I read the adjective human I have to think about how much truth a single word can convey. On the one hand “human”, an adjective, honours all the behaviors and attitudes we aspire to. On the other, it identfies, even in a slight derogatory sense, most of those acts we despise of but accept as consequences of our fallibility. Isn’t it amazing how a single word has evolved which tells our never ending story, the eternal tension between aspiration and fallibility?
So no “stain” is needed at all in that picture. But let’s face it, while probably more sincere, “human” would not have been a very good title for a novel.
Stuck somewhere in the middle. Growing up these days.
The German weekly “Die Zeit” this week provides a survey of the consequences of disappearing traditional family structures and socially predetermined gender roles for today’s youngsters.
According to the article, socio-athropologists and behavioral biologists alike now claim that kids these days are in dire need for authority and some sort of biographical structure. The price of freedom, of entirely open biographies, is apparently not a modest one – as rising suicidal attempts and a new autodestructive habits (German: “ritzen”) among both young boys and girls seem to indicate.
Now it is all too obvious that going back is not an option, and even the staunchest conservatives will agree on this point, at least in private. Even apart from the most obvious justifications from an economic and philosphical perspective, modern societies do need social variety as evolutionary organisational “market”.
But kids apparently need some sort of clear-cut answers about life and their position in society to grow up. Growing up does, of course, entail to question these previous certainties – but if there are none, no questions remain to be asked, no walls to be torn down.
But if going back is not an option – where are modern societies headed for? The one thing I think becomes obvious from reading accounts like the one cited above is that we are in need of a new social equilibrium – some sort of “steady-state-equilibrium”. One that is open and stable at the same time.
Don’t ask me for sketches as I don’t have any. But should that turn out to actually be an oxymoron, I fear we will have to witness more and more socially dysfunctional kids, grown ups and then parents – with a resulting negative feedback slope – until both people and society will have evolved in a way that can bridge the rising gap between our genetic and cultural endowments.
Now you might reply to this that no older generation in history has ever been able to understand their younger one and that the above article is simply an example of the classic generation-gap, reframed in modern scientific language by publication-hungry scientists.
That is quite possible. But I don’t think so.
Leviathan has to move.
A friend in need is a friend indeed. Leviathan certainly is not a friend of the Afghan people as recent reports of new fights in and around Kabul confirm.
So instead of trying to forge some sort of working government out of the state-of-nature-like inter-agency conflicts of competing warlords Leviathan apparently prefers competing with his friend Nicholo M. on who is best in curtailing civil liberties in the West. A state-of-the-extremely- scary-art example of the latter was exhibited last week in the New York Times, titled “Kafka in Tulia“.
I am not going ot summarise the article, I think it’s best if you read it yourself. Now if the West (and especially the US) want to underscore the theoretically sound claim that decent institutions of governance are prerequisite to economic and social development – and that the West is an example of those institutions – I think stories like the one above seem to make it necessary to reconsider the definition of “decent” in today’s politics.