Scotches to try:
Aberlour
Glenmorangie
Tried:
Lagavulin (16 yrs)
Talisker (10 yrs)
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Article: The Youtube solution
Below, an interesting Forbes article on IP, applying past experience with oil rights to predict how media IP will play out on the Internet.
By Daniel Fisher
In his new book, Gridlock Economy, Columbia University Law School Professor Michael Heller paints a scary picture in which property rights--copyrights, patents or individual parcels of land--strangle the economy and stifle innovation.
In Heller's world, new cures for Alzheimer's remain in the lab, films flounder unreleased and even hip-hop albums go unrecorded because it's simply too hard to buy off all the owners who are in a blocking position with their pesky property rights. It's a great theory, but is it true? I studied this problem during a year as a Knight Fellow at Yale Law School several years ago, and came to a different conclusion. In an unruly capitalistic playground like the Internet, the concept of "ownership" will get stretched beyond the breaking point and replaced with rules that allow creative works to be produced at a cost of some royalties going uncollected. Surprisingly, oil led me to this conclusion.
Oil is what economists call a "fugitive resource," a thing, like water or wild game, that migrates where it wants and is difficult to own in any conventional sense. Kind of like a grainy copy of an old episode of WKRP in Cincinnati that somebody posts on YouTube.
Sure, the content belongs to Fox and the songs playing the background are covered by a profusion of ownership claims. But a recent check showed at least 148 clips from WKRP on YouTube, including one with the Beatles hit "Come Together" playing in the background. That song, you might recall, includes a line filched from Chuck Berry's earlier single "You Can't Catch Me."
In other words, somehow the oil leaked out.
That's what usually happens with fugitive resources. Not only are they hard to control, but it's hard to figure out whether they are worth controlling in the first place. This is the problem with oilfields, a subject University of California-Santa Barbara Professor Gary Libecap has been studying since he was teaching at Texas A&M University in the early 1980s.
Oil must be managed properly or it will remain trapped in the ground. Too many wells release the natural pressure in the field, like fizz from a soda can, and it becomes too expensive to pump the oil out. This, economists will tell you, leads to a "tragedy of the commons," where individual owners, acting in their own self interests, destroy the resource.
There is a solution called unitization. This is where somebody--the government, usually--imposes an orderly drilling plan to get the maximum amount of oil out of the ground. Individual owners lose the right to drill, but get paid according to their "fair share" of the reserves. Legal academics call this substituting a property rule for a liability rule. You don't get to name your price, but you do get paid something.
Here's where it gets interesting: What Libecap found is that while most fields are eventually unitized, it often happens late in their lives. Before that, the owners of the common pool fight over their "fair share," with owners in the center holding out for better terms than the people on the periphery. The process slips into chaos when a large number of small landholders are involved, as when the Oklahoma City field was discovered in the late 1920s. The governor had to call in troops to halt the destructive drilling on single-family home lots.
Libecap's insight: When this gridlock occurs, the owners are fighting about information as much as oil. How can you agree to sell something when you don't know its value? It takes more information, or a crisis of some kind, to bring everybody to the table and work out a deal.
A similar process led to ASCAP and BMI, the licensing groups that give bars, restaurants and radio stations access to entire music libraries in exchange for a flat fee. In this case, the music is like a common pool of oil. It has thousands of owners, but those owners recognize that it makes no sense for them to hire lawyers and investigators to walk the streets of New York, listening in doorways to see if they're entitled to a 10-cent royalty for the public performance of their tune.
What does this have to do with YouTube? Columbia's Heller talks about a "tragedy of the anti-commons," where creative works are stifled because nobody can assemble the package of rights that make them possible. WKRP is one of his best examples--the DVD version was stalled for years because producers couldn't secure the rights to all the background music. Yet there it is on YouTube, copyright or no copyright.
Somebody had a grainy VCR copy of the original broadcast, perhaps, transferred it to digital and posted it on the Web. We're in the fighting stage over a vast common pool of ideas, and nobody knows what they're worth with new distribution outlets like YouTube, Facebook and cellular phones. Meanwhile, the oil is leaking out, in the same messy way it was sucked up through hundreds of backyard wells in Oklahoma City in 1931 before the troops marched in.
Henry Smith, my intellectual property law professor at Yale, says the problem boils down to "exclusionary rules" vs. "governance rules." Every first-year law student learns about Blackacre, a mythical estate whose owner has the sole right to decide who can enter and at what price. That's an exclusionary right, and Smith believes society hands these out when the boundaries of ownership are easy to grasp. I own this watch, you don't. If you want it, you have to buy it from me at a price I agree to.
With governance rules, the owner has some rights but gives some away; some of his oil gets sucked up another person's well, or patent royalties go uncollected because a group of manufacturers decided to throw all their patents into a common pool to cut down on the fighting among them. It's a collective system of ownership governed by rules, not exclusive control. Fugitive resources tend to shift toward governance rules, Smith said, because it's so hard to figure out the exact boundaries of the "property" and what it's worth.
Of course, companies that own intellectual property would prefer to extend the Blackacre analogy into cyberspace, barring unauthorized access to their Web sites and controlling every stray bit of intellectual content. Cyberlibertarians would do the opposite and infinitely expand the concept of fair use, or limited exemption to copyright protection.
"My personal view is it should be somewhere in between," said Smith. He compares cyberspace to private land in New England. Hunters have the right to cross property lines in search of game unless the property is clearly marked "no trespassing."
What does this mean for the consumer listening to the Beatles rip off Chuck Berry in the background of a WKRP episode? My guess is the various owners of the intellectual property leaking onto the Internet will admit defeat and form an uber-licensing agency, like ASCAP, that will collect a monthly fee in exchange for nearly universal access to music, movies and other forms of entertainment. Where the value is known--like a heavyweight boxing championship or real-time stock quotes--the content owner will be able to charge consumers on an a la carte basis.
But in many cases, the content will go fugitive and the rules will be simpler: Enjoy it yourself, and it's practically free. Make a business out of it, and you'll probably hear from Fox's lawyers.
By Daniel Fisher
In his new book, Gridlock Economy, Columbia University Law School Professor Michael Heller paints a scary picture in which property rights--copyrights, patents or individual parcels of land--strangle the economy and stifle innovation.
In Heller's world, new cures for Alzheimer's remain in the lab, films flounder unreleased and even hip-hop albums go unrecorded because it's simply too hard to buy off all the owners who are in a blocking position with their pesky property rights. It's a great theory, but is it true? I studied this problem during a year as a Knight Fellow at Yale Law School several years ago, and came to a different conclusion. In an unruly capitalistic playground like the Internet, the concept of "ownership" will get stretched beyond the breaking point and replaced with rules that allow creative works to be produced at a cost of some royalties going uncollected. Surprisingly, oil led me to this conclusion.
Oil is what economists call a "fugitive resource," a thing, like water or wild game, that migrates where it wants and is difficult to own in any conventional sense. Kind of like a grainy copy of an old episode of WKRP in Cincinnati that somebody posts on YouTube.
Sure, the content belongs to Fox and the songs playing the background are covered by a profusion of ownership claims. But a recent check showed at least 148 clips from WKRP on YouTube, including one with the Beatles hit "Come Together" playing in the background. That song, you might recall, includes a line filched from Chuck Berry's earlier single "You Can't Catch Me."
In other words, somehow the oil leaked out.
That's what usually happens with fugitive resources. Not only are they hard to control, but it's hard to figure out whether they are worth controlling in the first place. This is the problem with oilfields, a subject University of California-Santa Barbara Professor Gary Libecap has been studying since he was teaching at Texas A&M University in the early 1980s.
Oil must be managed properly or it will remain trapped in the ground. Too many wells release the natural pressure in the field, like fizz from a soda can, and it becomes too expensive to pump the oil out. This, economists will tell you, leads to a "tragedy of the commons," where individual owners, acting in their own self interests, destroy the resource.
There is a solution called unitization. This is where somebody--the government, usually--imposes an orderly drilling plan to get the maximum amount of oil out of the ground. Individual owners lose the right to drill, but get paid according to their "fair share" of the reserves. Legal academics call this substituting a property rule for a liability rule. You don't get to name your price, but you do get paid something.
Here's where it gets interesting: What Libecap found is that while most fields are eventually unitized, it often happens late in their lives. Before that, the owners of the common pool fight over their "fair share," with owners in the center holding out for better terms than the people on the periphery. The process slips into chaos when a large number of small landholders are involved, as when the Oklahoma City field was discovered in the late 1920s. The governor had to call in troops to halt the destructive drilling on single-family home lots.
Libecap's insight: When this gridlock occurs, the owners are fighting about information as much as oil. How can you agree to sell something when you don't know its value? It takes more information, or a crisis of some kind, to bring everybody to the table and work out a deal.
A similar process led to ASCAP and BMI, the licensing groups that give bars, restaurants and radio stations access to entire music libraries in exchange for a flat fee. In this case, the music is like a common pool of oil. It has thousands of owners, but those owners recognize that it makes no sense for them to hire lawyers and investigators to walk the streets of New York, listening in doorways to see if they're entitled to a 10-cent royalty for the public performance of their tune.
What does this have to do with YouTube? Columbia's Heller talks about a "tragedy of the anti-commons," where creative works are stifled because nobody can assemble the package of rights that make them possible. WKRP is one of his best examples--the DVD version was stalled for years because producers couldn't secure the rights to all the background music. Yet there it is on YouTube, copyright or no copyright.
Somebody had a grainy VCR copy of the original broadcast, perhaps, transferred it to digital and posted it on the Web. We're in the fighting stage over a vast common pool of ideas, and nobody knows what they're worth with new distribution outlets like YouTube, Facebook and cellular phones. Meanwhile, the oil is leaking out, in the same messy way it was sucked up through hundreds of backyard wells in Oklahoma City in 1931 before the troops marched in.
Henry Smith, my intellectual property law professor at Yale, says the problem boils down to "exclusionary rules" vs. "governance rules." Every first-year law student learns about Blackacre, a mythical estate whose owner has the sole right to decide who can enter and at what price. That's an exclusionary right, and Smith believes society hands these out when the boundaries of ownership are easy to grasp. I own this watch, you don't. If you want it, you have to buy it from me at a price I agree to.
With governance rules, the owner has some rights but gives some away; some of his oil gets sucked up another person's well, or patent royalties go uncollected because a group of manufacturers decided to throw all their patents into a common pool to cut down on the fighting among them. It's a collective system of ownership governed by rules, not exclusive control. Fugitive resources tend to shift toward governance rules, Smith said, because it's so hard to figure out the exact boundaries of the "property" and what it's worth.
Of course, companies that own intellectual property would prefer to extend the Blackacre analogy into cyberspace, barring unauthorized access to their Web sites and controlling every stray bit of intellectual content. Cyberlibertarians would do the opposite and infinitely expand the concept of fair use, or limited exemption to copyright protection.
"My personal view is it should be somewhere in between," said Smith. He compares cyberspace to private land in New England. Hunters have the right to cross property lines in search of game unless the property is clearly marked "no trespassing."
What does this mean for the consumer listening to the Beatles rip off Chuck Berry in the background of a WKRP episode? My guess is the various owners of the intellectual property leaking onto the Internet will admit defeat and form an uber-licensing agency, like ASCAP, that will collect a monthly fee in exchange for nearly universal access to music, movies and other forms of entertainment. Where the value is known--like a heavyweight boxing championship or real-time stock quotes--the content owner will be able to charge consumers on an a la carte basis.
But in many cases, the content will go fugitive and the rules will be simpler: Enjoy it yourself, and it's practically free. Make a business out of it, and you'll probably hear from Fox's lawyers.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Murakami musical references
Musical references from Kafka on the Shore (from J Shifty's blog):
- Schubert Piano Sonata in D Major
- Crossroads - Cream
- Heigh - Ho - Andre Rieu
- Mi Chiamano Mimi - Puccini (Maria Callas)
- As Time Goes By - Billie Holiday
- 4th Time Around - Bob Dylan
- (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding
- Corcovado - Getz/Gilberto
- Sexy MF - Prince
- Archduke Trio - Beethoven
- My Favorite Things - John Coltrane
Musical references from The Wind-up Bird Chronicles (anonymous poster on J Shifty's blog):
- Sonice Wind--Calexico
- Speechless--Cibo Matto
- Opening--Philip Glass
- The Gunner's Dream--Pink Floyd
- Looking At The World from The Bottom of a Well--Mike Doughty
- In Our Gun--Gomez
- Waiting for My Real Life to Begin--Colin Hay
- Starting Over--Crystal Method
- Hallo Space Boy--David Bowie
- Pepita--Calexico
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Another reason I study Chinese
Well, it's not high on the list of reasons why, but it makes more sense to others than the joy of staring at the hordes passing by the Starbucks at Wang Fu Jing. The following an excerpt from a transcript (thanks to Whitney) of a Charlie Munger talk at USCL
Makes sense to me.
Another example of not thinking through the consequences of the consequences is the standard reaction in economics to Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage giving benefit on both sides of trade. Ricardo came up with a wonderful, non-obvious explanation that was so powerful that people were charmed with it, and they still are, because it’s a very useful idea. Everybody in economics understands that comparative advantage is a big deal, when one considers first order advantages in trade from the Ricardo effect. But suppose you’ve got a very talented ethnic group, like the Chinese, and they’re very poor and backward, and you’re an advanced nation, and you create free trade with China, and it goes on for a long time.
Now let’s follow and second and third order consequences: You are more prosperous than you would have been if you hadn’t traded with China in terms of average well-being in the United States, right? Ricardo proved it. But which nation is going to be growing faster in economic terms? It’s obviously China. They’re absorbing all the modern technology of the world through this great facilitator in free trade, and, like the Asian Tigers have proved, they will get ahead fast. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan. Look at early Japan. So, you start in a place where you’ve got a weak nation of backward peasants, a billion and a quarter of them, and in the end they’re going to be a much bigger, stronger nation than you are, maybe even having more and better atomic bombs. Well, Ricardo did not prove that that’s a wonderful outcome for the former leading nation. He didn’t try to determine second order and higher order effects.
If you try and talk like this to an economics professor, and I’ve done this three times, they shrink in horror and offense because they don’t like this kind of talk. It really gums up this nice discipline of theirs, which is so much simpler when you ignore second and third order consequences.
The best answer I ever got on that subject – in three tries – was from George Schultz. He said, “Charlie, the way I figure it is if we stop trading with China, the other advanced nations will do it anyway, and we wouldn’t stop the ascent of China compared to us, and we’d lose the Ricardo-diagnosed advantages of trade,” which is obviously correct. And I said, “Well George, you’ve just invented a new form of the tragedy of the commons. You’re locked in this system and you can’t fix it. You’re going to go to a tragic hell in a handbasket, if going to hell involves being once the great leader of the world and finally going to the shallows in terms of leadership.” And he said, “Charlie, I do not want to think about this.” I think he’s wise. He’s even older than I am, and maybe I should learn from him.
Makes sense to me.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
We saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night (finally) and thought it was very good.
I think the most moving scene was when Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet just broke into the abandoned oceanfront house, the same day they had just met at a beach party. The contrast between their characters manifests itself with Carrey's decision to return to the beach party, "running from his humiliation." At that point the surf is surrounding the house and the rafters are collapsing, indications that this last memory of Winslet are being erased. He begins to share with Winslet that her offhanded comment, "just go," was belittling to him, and that plus his discomfort with illegally entering a stranger's home caused his snap decision to leave. Their final kiss in the scene is made more poignant by his admission that he always regretted his decision to run, and that this last, fading memory would serve as their final goodbye.
I liked the imagery of the Lacuna technicians chasing Jim Carrey's consciousness around as a little dot on a brain scan. It's probably not very accurate as memories are probably big clouds of dots, but consciousness feels like a single dot.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Bezos on quarterly retreats
Watching Bezos interview on Charlie Rose (from Kindle launch on Nov 19, 2007) he talks about his retreat:
Every quarter Bezos takes 2-3 days, completely alone, isolated from family and friends, no phones or interruptions. “With a little bit of isolation, I find I get more creative.” He’ll think, reflect, surf the Internet, see what people are doing, what hobbyists and hackers are doing (things on cutting edge). Then he’ll write several 2-3 page memos – either to himself (wakes up next day and decides they’re worthless) or to others. Once a quarter is the right “Metronome.” Come up with principles, themes, even tactical inventions. Bring back to the office and socialize with broader executive team. At end of process, he’s not sure if he really invented anything or not. Result of having a bunch of smart people, because you get all t heir criticism and suggestions.
This is similar to Bill Gates’s practice of going away occasionally for several weeks, taking a stack of books.
He also mentioned Blue Origin's company theme: "Gradatim Ferociter" (Step by Step, Courageously). Hokey, but it captures the engineering/MIT/Edison ethos.
Every quarter Bezos takes 2-3 days, completely alone, isolated from family and friends, no phones or interruptions. “With a little bit of isolation, I find I get more creative.” He’ll think, reflect, surf the Internet, see what people are doing, what hobbyists and hackers are doing (things on cutting edge). Then he’ll write several 2-3 page memos – either to himself (wakes up next day and decides they’re worthless) or to others. Once a quarter is the right “Metronome.” Come up with principles, themes, even tactical inventions. Bring back to the office and socialize with broader executive team. At end of process, he’s not sure if he really invented anything or not. Result of having a bunch of smart people, because you get all t heir criticism and suggestions.
This is similar to Bill Gates’s practice of going away occasionally for several weeks, taking a stack of books.
He also mentioned Blue Origin's company theme: "Gradatim Ferociter" (Step by Step, Courageously). Hokey, but it captures the engineering/MIT/Edison ethos.
Comments on Scotch from JoeP
here's a somewhat simple way of thinking about scotch. there are blends and there are single malts. blends tend to have a more balanced taste -- that makes them popular and well liked and that is kind of the point of blending. single malts have a more distinctive character and tend to vary regionally. the older, more expensive stuff tends to be more smooth and complex, while younger scotches tend to me more brash and less sophisticated. there is also a trend now towards casking in oak barrels used for sherry, port, and such, making them kind of subltly "flavored." i mostly look down on this trend. anyway, in my simple model, you can further divide single malts into highland malts and Islay malts. the most popular highland malts are the best-selling (in the u.s.) glenlivet, glenfiddich (the two best selling in the us), and macallan. although the older more expensive stuff can be quite tasty, i am a big fan of Islay scotches, which are distilled on an island dominated by peat bogs that conveys a smokey taste. the most popular islay scotches are laphroig and lagavulin. another very nice scotch is talisker, from the isle of sky. kind of in-between islay and highland. if i was getting steve a bottle, keeping in mine my bias towards my own personal tastes, i would get him lagavulin 16 ($65-95) or talisker. you can even find christmas-y gift boxes that come with cute little glasses -- i know i've seen talisker sold in this fashion.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Flowers from Kari in Mexico
Lots of tulips from sweety Kari in Chacala. There were so many I needed to get an extra vase! The Space Needle should be visible in the doors behind the flowers.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Estimating life expectancy
The IRS has published some useful data based on calculations from the dismal science's cousin, actuarial statistics. This data was compiled into a spreadsheet by the website retireearlyhomepage.com. I placed their spreadsheet into a Googledoc spreadsheet here. It's interesting that life expectancy seems to increase when the person in question has a spouse. For Kari and I, our table is as follows:
So each of us has a 50-50 chance of living for another 45.11 years. As a couple, the last survivor of the two of us has a 50-50 chance of living another 51 years.
So each of us has a 50-50 chance of living for another 45.11 years. As a couple, the last survivor of the two of us has a 50-50 chance of living another 51 years.
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