Summer research fellowship in NY, and other IP news

John Quiggin8 Comments

If you’re interested in the relationship between ideas, interests and institutions, the development of intellectual property law provides a fascinating (somewhat self-referential) case study. The intellectual debate has been running hard against strong IP [1] for a long time, and changes in technology have not only made copying and reproducing all kinds of material much cheaper and easier, but have revealed, on a scale much larger than before, the benefits that can be realised from free access to ideas.

Meanwhile the extension of IP rights, and the expansion of powers to protect them has rolled on as if none of this was happening, at national (DMCA), bilateral (as a standard condition of US-driven free trade agreements) and global (TRIPS) level.

However, there are some positive countervailing developments, one of which has a summer fellowship attached (over the fold).

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Monday Message Board (Easter Tuesday)

John Quiggin16 Comments

After a longer than usual weekend, it’s time for another message Board. Long weekends always make me think this is something we should have more of, and maybe an economic downturn is the right time to start thinking about more holidays instead of higher wages. Your thoughts on this, or any topic, are welcome. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language.

buy The Hit

All in the family

John Quiggin22 Comments

If you need to know why New South Wales is in urgent need of a change of government, and why the ALP there is in urgent need of intervention, go no further than this SMH story about how a change of policy to support prison privatisation was pushed through a party committee.

A victory for the Government was assured. The committee chairman is Richard Tripodi, the brother of the Minister for Finance, Joe Tripodi, and husband of the Drummoyne MP Angela D’Amore.

Another committee member is Anna Collins, the wife of Mr Robertson’s chief of staff, Chris Minns, while another member is Mark Hay, the son of the Wollongong MP Noreen Hay.

A member of the party’s powerful administrative committee told the Herald that “a fix [was] in” to prevent embarrassment to the Government and to advance Mr Robertson’s status as a future leader.

“It’s a complete stitch-up, sending it to a dodgy committee run by a minister’s brother, an MP’s son and a key apparatchik’s wife,” the member said.

This kind of nepotism is rife in Australian politics, but in the NSW Labor Party it’s beyond a joke, on both (all) sides of the factional fence. People like Belinda Neal and Martin Ferguson would never have made it into Parliament on their own merits, and would probably have been on the other side if not for their family ties, but Neal made it to the shadow ministry back in the 1990s, and Ferguson is now a senior minister.

More bad news for the Murray-Darling

John Quiggin5 Comments
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Thanks to a combination of continued drought and the long-term increase in temperatures, exacerbated by land-use changes such as increased use of farm dams, inflows to the Murray-Darling system have hit a new record low

It will take quite a few years of above-average rainfall to restore the system to anything like the pre-drought situation and there is, so far, no suggestion that we are going to see this. On the contrary, the reverse is more likely, both in the short run and the long run.

A lot of my work with the Risk and Sustainable Management Group deals with adaptation to climate change in the Basin. There’s quite a bit of scope for this, but if inflows fall as far as the most likely climate scenarios project over the next century, irrigated agriculture will cease to be feasible.

The broadband revolution

John Quiggin68 Comments

Like most people, I was surprised by the announcement that the Rudd government proposes to build its own Fibre-To-The-Home network, covering 90 per cent of the population, at an estimated cost of $43 billion. I haven’t seen enough to make an informed judgement, but since this is a blog, I’ll offer some uninformed judgements instead

* Something had to be done about Telstra, and its continuous attempts to hold the country to ransom by virtue of its monopoly ownership of the copper wire network. The plan includes a breakup of Telstra and will, if successful, imply that the new network will largely supplant Telstra’s. The obvious alternative, canvassed here by Paul Kerin, would be to renationalise Telstra, keep what was needed and sell the rest. Politically, that’s probably an even harder sell than the current proposal, but it has some significant attractions

* On the assumption that the network needs a 10 per cent return to cover capital costs and depreciation, it needs revenue of around $4 billion a year, on top of operating costs, say $1 billion a year. That would require 5 million households and small businesses to pay $1000 a year (about $80/month) each. Not beyond the bounds of possibility, given the increasing centrality of the Internet, but unlikely if all that is on offer is a faster version of the existing product

* This implies the need for a “killer app”, and the obvious one, to my mind, is video-telephony/video-conferencing. It can be done, just, with existing technology, but the possibilities would be radically transformed by the advent of near-universal fast broadband.

* The idea of eventual privatisation reflects the government’s residual attachment to the ideas of the past 30 years. But, if this is a success, and if current interventions generate an economic recovery, I doubt that any government will be in a hurry to sell. Of course, if it’s a failure, they’ll be keen to sell, but won’t get much of a price.

* This is clearly a case of ‘picking winners’, but where technology is characterized by huge scale economies, that’s more or less inevitable. Certainly we haven’t done well with the notionally hands-off approach we’ve adopted for the last fifteen years or so.

* The chance of getting this through the current Senate is just about zero. If the government’s popularity holds up, the case for a double dissolution will become steadily stronger over the course of 2009