So I'm mostly posting this because I can. According to the map on the screen in front of me I'm in between Salt Lake City and Denver at an altitude of 35,000 feet. For the ten and a half hour flight from LA to Munich, I'm paying a lump sum of $27 for a high speed internet connection. So what does this have to do with monopoly? At the moment, using skype, I can call - with pretty good sound - anyone with skype anywhere in the world for free, and anyone in the U.S. or Europe for about 2 cents a minute. Once I arrive in Munich and start using my cell phone, the price goes up to a dollar a minute. There is pretty clearly some lack of competition in international roaming rates - it can't cost fifty times more to call by cell than it does by skype. Fifty times - that is a high price to pay for monopoly.

Addendum: David Laibson was puzzling over the same thing in Munich. The problem is that neither of us can figure out where there is lack of competition. There are multiple US providers that offer overseas roaming, and multiple overseas providers with whom they can and do contract. So unless there is some government regulation here we don't know about, the market looks pretty competitive. My best guess is that what is going on has something to do with bundling - few people are going to switch U.S. providers just because of a small difference in international roaming rates. When T-Mobile offered much better rates than Cingular several years ago, Cingular lowered their rates to be closer to T-Mobile, but they didn't try to undercut them.

One of the most important forms of competition and protections against entrenched monopoly is immigration. Most economists recognize this, and a great many, myself included, signed an open letter arguing in favor of generous immigration policy. Matt Yglesias questions our sincerity.

I'll believe that this is all about altruism when I see an open letter from economists demanding that we scrap the complicated H1B visa system and instead allow unrestricted immigration of foreign college professors without all these requirements about prevailing wages, work conditions, non-displacement, good-faith recruitment of natives, etc. Obviously, there are many foreign born professors in the United States, but there could be many more, wages for academics could be lower, and college tuitions could be significantly lower. If there's really no difference between "us" and "them" economists should be leading the charge to disassemble the system of employment protections they enjoy.

I wouldn't argue that our views have to do with altruism. It is possible to selfishly believe that the overall benefits of improving competition outweight the negative impact on yourself. As far as personal self-interest goes - I think that the H1B visa system is pretty ineffective at preventing foreign competition. Yglesias is pretty naive if he thinks that the current system keeps people out. If you look at our economics graduate programs and assistant professors, it isn't clear that it is feasible to increase the percentage who are foreign born - that number can't go over 100%.

But regardless the current system is obnoxious and unjust. I would prefer that anyone who wants to come to the U.S. be allowed to do so with minimal paper work. I think there are two views one can have of competition. Mine is - bring it on.

Tim Lee points out that the RIAA would like our lawmakers to cease and desist. The disconnect between the copyright absolutists (and before you ask, no I don't mean Tim, I mean the RIAA) and reality grows greater everyday.

It is being widely reported that two rappers, Ludacris and Kanye are accused of stealing the lyrics to their hit song "Stand Up" from a song by a little known rap group, It's Our Family, called "Straight Like That". The specific accusation seems to be that "Stand Up" repeats many time the phrase "just like that" while the song "Straight Like That" repeats the phrase "straight like that." I guess the accusation is that "It's Our Family" owns the rights to the words "like that" at least if it is repeated enough times. But hey it is their intellectual property, right? Here are the relevant lyrics from "Stand Up"

[Chorus: Ludacris and (Shawna)]
When I move you move (just like that?)
When I move you move (just like that?)
When I move you move (just like that?)
Hell yeah! Hey DJ bring that back!
(When I move you move) just like that?
(When I move you move) just like that?
(When I move you move) just like that?
(Hell yeah, Hey DJ bring that back!)

and from "Straight Like That"

[capone] It's thugged out entertainment nigga
[final chapter] Straight like that
[capone] We cut, shoot, stab, sell crack
[algado] Straight like that
[capone] We eat, sleep, shit street life
[algado] Straight like that
[capone] We get knocked bail the same night
[algado] Straight like that

The similarity is obvious.

Addendum June 5, 2006: Another triumph for common sense in the courts. "Our Family" lost.

There is an article over on Ars Technica about emusic. After Apple they are the biggest vendor of online music. The interesting feature is that they sell MP3 tracks without DRM - which has the advantage that their music runs on anything, the iPod, for example.

The majors are terrified of piracy and so insist on strict DRM controls to safeguard their music. The indie labels that eMusic works with generally don't have that fear. "The indies have always viewed the world differently," says Pakman [the CEO of emusic]. "You know, the indies struggle for attention, for customers, so the notion of someone actually digging a track and e-mailing it to 10 of their best friends doing self-promotion that's music to the ears of the indie record labels. Whereas an RIAA member says, 'We've got to sue that guy.'"

In other words: the marginal musicians - the ones who might stop producing music if they made less money - aren't getting much benefit of copyright. It is the star musicians - the ones who would keep right on making music for a fraction of what they are paid now - who benefit from copyright. But the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the star musician at the expense of everyone else.

Who would have thought there was a website called "Plagiarism Today"? Or that they wouldn't have a clue about what plagiarism is? As you might have thought, Merriam-Webster defines plagiarize as

transitive senses : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

intransitive senses : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

The point being of course that plagiarism is about attribution. But not according to "Plagiarism Today." They believe that blogs are the new plagiarists because they

are marked with large swaths of block quotes and heavy content reuse, but also proper attribution and at least some original content.

The post then goes on to talk about fair use, as if that had some connection to plagiarism. Is it too much to ask that a website specializing in plagiarism know the difference between plagiarism and copyright violation? (HT: Slashdot)

Addendum: Jonathan Bailey, the author of the post in question, replies to my post in the comment section. As he says, the plagiarism wording was taken from several articles on the subject. The thrust of his article was really about copyright and fair use, not about plagiarism - and he doesn't talk about plagiarism in his own comments, just uses it as a hook. So in fairness to him I'll direct the comments above at the articles he links to and not at his post.

Commenting on his post: I think aggregating other people's work with attribution is a good thing. In the case of this blog, if you read the copyright stuff on the right, you have the legal right to quote as much of this stuff as you want, and I think that the general view among bloggers is that being quoted a lot is good publicity. On the creativity side, organizing things is often as valuable as creating the components that are being organized. I would love to live in a world without copyright where we would all quote each other and build on each others work without involving lawyers.

In an an earlier post I talked about the Microsoft campaign against thought thieves. I finally found out what they must be talking about. They must be channelling Harlan Rook

All those films he made. Those are my nightmares, not his! Every night I dream, and somehow he reads my mind. He stole my thoughts. He put my thoughts on film, and he takes all the credit. He can't get away with it. He has to pay.

Daniel Wallace has challenged the GPL license widely used for open source software. He argues that it violates the anti-trust laws by making entry into the software industry difficult because it keeps price low. Groklaw has a nice article on the dismissal of his first lawsuit. Enterprise Open Source Magazine (HT: Slashdot) is reporting the dismissal of his second lawsuit. Yet another victory for sanity in the judiciary: both judges pointed out that that it isn't anti-competitive to sell good products at low prices, however difficult it makes it for people like Daniel Wallace to enter the industry selling lousy products at high prices.

It will probably seem like I am picking on Tim Lee, but I think he is articulate and sensible. I also think that Mike Masnick is articulate and sensible, but then again, he is agreeing with me. Tim argues about my post concerning movie costs

This is a good argument, but I still don't entirely buy it. Certainly, this gives us a reason to think the optimal price for movies in the future will not be $200 million, as better technology allows us to cut the costs of the expensive special effects and film-based recording technologies that contribute to the cost of Hollywood movies. Certainly, that will bring down the cost of blockbuster movies somewhat.

...

I have the impression (please correct me if I'm wrong) that much of the cost is driven by the immense amount of labor required to create a top-quality film. You've got lighting crews, camera crews, makeup crews, set crews, sound crews, post-production crews, and on and on. Another major cost is the environment in which actors act. Either you have to move your cast and crew to a new location, which involves a lot of travel costs, or you have to construct sets, which requires considerable materials and labor for their construction.

Star Wreck had all of this. I think at this point a picture and quote should do the trick. This is the bridge of the starship in Star Wreck

In the earlier post I talked about the render farm because I thought the picture of the kitchen was a pretty low cost example of a render farm. But if you see the movie - you will realize that they have elaborate sets, ranging from the bridge of several starships - much more elaborate and larger than in the Star Trek or Star Wars movies - as for example, the set above - to battles in the snow or inside a nuclear center. How did they do this? The quote is worth repeating

A: What sets? The bridge sets are all virtual. The on-location shoots were made at locations that didn't cost any money (schools, public places etc). The "bluescreen studio" is actually a small piece of blue linoleum in Samuli's living room...

The cost in other words was essentially nothing. See the movie then read how they did it - it changed my mind about the costs of making a movie, I suspect it will change yours. BTW - I don't know what they did for a sound crew, but the sound quality sounds to me to be quite good.

A lone blogger Peter [last name unknown to me] has taken on the Amazon one-click patent. It is expensive to file patent appeals - he raised the money by asking people to vote against the patent with their dollars. He successfully raised the filing fee and has filed the appeal. He identified significant prior art that should - in a just world - invalidate the patent. His beta test of a market based procedure for getting rid of ridiculous patents continues. Let us wish him luck and give him our support.