Schlagwort-Archive: internet

oddly enough

E-Begging. Find your favorite beggar – online

Karyn - needs another $17.000The weirdest things happen on the internet. Here‘s another story (link in German) which lives up to that standard.

Karyn is living in NYC. She is working for a tv-station. And while she is not the minor celebrity in the major city impersonated by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex And The City, Carrie Bradshaw and Karyn do have something in common: both have a strange relationship with expensive designer shoes. And both spent way too much money on them. But that’s where the similarity ends.

In fiction, there’s always a divorced friend who hands out $30.000 engagement rings. In reality, you end up with a huge credit card debt – which is precisely what happened to Karyn. So, lacking the diamond ring, she opened an account with PayPal and designed a webpage to make people donate money to help her pay off the debt she incurred due to obsessive shopping. Check it out.

Now weird things attract everyone’s attention. Just remember the freak shows of earlier, less pc, days. So the word is spreading and that attention is translating into money for Karyn. She claims to have already been given $3000.

I find that stunning, to say the least. But while I am intruiged by her chuzpe to put up such a site, I wonder whether speeding up the process of repaying her designed debt is really money well spent. And there are more people who think that way. As n-tv.de reports, two of them have even created a website dedicated to keeping people from giving money to Karyn – www.dontsavekaryn.com.

These two guys also ask for money on their page – but not to pay off any debt – just to, literally, burn it. In case they can raise enough to buy a pair of designer shoes, they will buy one and then burn it.

As strange as both projects appear to be, maybe it is more useful to think of them as well crafted services: Karyn offers a glimps on begging 2.0 (with the added value of non invasive, client controlled cyber-contact, online debt count-down, etc.) and her adversaries market a service for all those who are appalled by someone who is asking for money for lack of self-control.

In the end, both parties demonstrate significant entrepreneurial spirit. But anyway – I won’t give a penny to either of them.

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intellectual property rights, media

The Secret War. Today: Eldred vs. Ashcroft.

FREE THE MOUSEWhen 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!

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