Monthly Archives: February 2011

WSJ: more regulations for law schools?

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When the Wall Street Journal starts countenancing additional regulations for law schools, you know that the world really has changed:

Regulation? all you free-marketeers are asking. Really? Won’t regulation further drive up the cost of education, which is already stunningly high?

However, rather than dismissing the suggestion of greater regulation out of hand, WSJ blogger Ashby Jones finds Tung Yin’s argument for Sarbanes-Oxley-like regulation over at PrawfsBlawg “compelling”.  As Yin puts it:

If anything, it seems to me there’s arguably a stronger call for enforcing these sorts of disclosure and accuracy provisions on law schools (and universities in general) than on corporations. After all, the cost of corporate malfeasance with regard to balance sheets and the like is diffused across a huge number of investors, who are presumably not taking out huge loans with which to invest in said corporate stock.  (I guess there are margin traders, but really, they seem a less sympathetic group for concern than poor students with huge education debt.)  The cost of law school malfeasance in terms of misleading or false employment data is visited upon a (relatively) small number of students who are saddled with $50,000 or more in student debt.  Shouldn’t they be entitled to at least the same level of informational protection that stock investors now get?

I disagree with Yin’s analysis somewhat.  While it is true that there are “a (relatively) small number of students” with extreme educational debt, malfeasance by academic institutions has the same sorts of diffuse, wide-ranging implications that malfeasance by corporations has.  The federal government subsidizes or provides outright the bulk of law student loans.  Were it not for this subsidy, it is highly doubtful that law schools would attain their currently high enrollment numbers since no rational (i.e., unsubsidized) lender would loan six figures each to tens-of-thousands of 22-year-olds (at least, not on terms that would result in tens-of-thousands of new law students each year).

Like it or not, the U.S. government is heavily subsidizing legal education by providing students with access to virtually unlimited capital.  One can argue whether or not this represents a prudent investment in the nation’s future or an impending boondoggle on the scale of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it seems clear to me that somebody should be requiring law schools to reveal the cold, hard facts on the value they are providing to their graduates.

The tired free-market-vs.-regulation arguments don’t really work here.  Law schools are not a free market; they’re a heavily subsidized one.  Unless and until that changes, I for one think the government is perfectly (and prudently) within its rights as the subsidizer to require fair, full, and accurate employment disclosure from law schools.

One proposal for 8 options instead of going to college

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James Altucher is a “money manager and author” who has put out some provocative ideas about avoiding college, partly because of its high cost at numerous campuses. And Altucher has recently come up with 8 alternatives to college that he would encourage teenagers to pursue:

  • Start a business.
  • Work for a charity.
  • Travel the world.
  • Create art.
  • Master a sport.
  • Master a game.
  • Write a book.
  • Make people laugh.

This is an interesting list. A number of these items push teenagers to expand their horizons or be creative, rather than simply following prescribed paths of going to college.

Seizing the spotlight

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One of the items highlighted in Monday’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) report (92 page PDF–see here for my previous post) was government seizures of various domain names allegedly associated with infringing comment.  Bruce Lidi over at ZeroPaid makes a compelling argument that the publicity associated with such tactics is counter-productive at best:

As nearly every analysis of the recent ICE action has noted, by seizing the US registered domain names of foreign-owned and operated sites, the authorities have propelled the sites to set up on domains not under US control, and to do so within days, if not hours, of the seizures….It would appear that aside from a very momentary interruption, the practical effect of the seizures will be negligible, except to make any future actions by rights holders that much more difficult, since the targeted sites will be farther from US jurisdiction.

Additionally, and even more importantly, the recent ICE domain seizures that focused on sports streaming sites has had, and will continue to have, the effect of generating more publicity for this kind of infringing.  Consistent with the concept of the “Streisand Effect,” attempts to suppress troublesome information online result invariably in that information becoming even more widely distributed.  While impossible to quantify with any certainty, the seizures by ICE surely increased awareness of the existence of rojadirecta and atdhe, and even more, of the ease in which viewers can access live streaming of sporting events online.  As we so often see in articles about “cord-cutting,” or dropping cable in favor of purely internet video delivery, many people are stymied by the lack of live sports online, yet now, because of the actions of ICE, millions more viewers have just been instructed that it is actually quite simple to get live footage of every soccer match or football game.

Lidi’s analysis reminded me of countless debates I’ve read about U.S. military policy.  Some people favor a “shock and awe” approach while others think that “winning over hearts and minds” is the way to go.  Unfortunately for the content industry, I’m not sure that they’re ever going to win people over completely to their way of thinking.  Anyone who claims that, as a practical matter, people don’t have the right to rip their owned CD into Mp3’s (article from 2008 but still true–see the RIAA’s current website) has completely lost touch with reality.

Social psychologists respond to claim of liberal bias in their field

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The New York Times describes a recent speech by a social psychologist arguing that liberals are underrepresented in academia. While this argument is not new to academia (the article cites several studies of recent years saying similar things), it is interesting to note how the social psychologists responded:

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism…

Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.

In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”

As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.

Several questions come to mind:

1. What will social psychologists do about this in the long run? It’s not surprising that the executive committee didn’t support the 10% by 2020 plan but what will they actively do to promote conservative involvement in this discipline?

2. How will the response to this within academia differ from the response outside of academia, particularly among groups who consistently already make noise about academics being too liberal?

3. In the long run, does this liberal bias mean that all or most of research within this field (and others) is not objective or true?

Let’s hope the “new normal” in housing doesn’t look like Merced County, CA

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A USA Today article about the “new normal” in US housing uses Merced County, California as its main example. The situation there is not good:

The median home price, $116,000, is down 68% from its peak in 2006. Three of five homeowners with a mortgage here owe more on their loans than their houses are worth, compared with about one in five nationally.

While the situation is particularly dire in Merced County, it is also not great in a number of other places:

Nationwide, home prices are down 30% from their 2006 peak. Moody’s Analytics economist Celia Chen says national home prices will regain that ground by 2021.

Some areas will take far longer. In 22 U.S. metropolitan regions, most in California and Florida, home prices won’t return to their 2006 peaks before 2030, Chen estimates. That includes such cities as Miami, Detroit, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Riverside, Calif.

And a USA Today chart shows the counties with the most mortgages underwater: Clark County, Nevada (where Las Vegas is located) is at the top with 71.1% of mortgages underwater. Overall, there are 17 counties over 50% and the top 30 on the chart are all over 46%.

This is a long-term issue for these places, particularly if housing values for the whole country aren’t expected to reach the 2006 peak until at least 2021.

Your social network might lead to disease

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A study of the passing of swine flu among a set of schoolchildren found that the disease was primarily spread through one’s social network:

A new study of a 2009 epidemic at a school in Pennsylvania has found that children most likely did not catch it by sitting near an infected classmate, and that adults who got sick were probably not infected by their own children.

Closing the school after the epidemic was under way did little to slow the rate of transmission, the study found, and the most common way the disease spread was a through child’s network of friends…

The scientists collected data on 370 students from 295 households. Almost 35 percent of the students and more than 15 percent of their household contacts came down with flu. The most detailed information was gathered from fourth graders, the group most affected by the outbreak.

The class and grade structure had a significant effect on transmission rates. Transmission was 25 times as intensive among classmates as between children in different grades. And yet sitting next to a student who was infected did not increase the chances of catching flu.

Social networks were apparently a more significant means of transmission than seating arrangements. Students were four times as likely to play with children of the same sex as with those of the opposite sex, and following this pattern, boys were more likely to catch the flu from other boys, and girls from other girls.

This sounds like a very interesting dataset as it was collected in real-time as the disease spread. Hopefully, we will get more data like this in the future so that we aren’t left with the problem of trying to trace a disease’s spread after the fact. But getting this kind of data would require more intense observation (or records) of a specific group of people.

If closing the school is not the answer, how then should authorities respond in order to slow down the spread of disease?

Sounds like another advantage for Social Networking Sites where you can interact with your friends with only the threat of a computer virus…

U.S. intellectual property enforcement actions: the report

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CNET News alerted me to yesterday’s release of the 2010 U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Annual Report on Intellectual Property Enforcement (92 page PDF):

The 92-page report…reads a lot like a report that could have been prepared by lobbyists for the recording or movie industry: it boasts the combined number of FBI and Homeland Security infringement investigations jumped by a remarkable 40 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Nowhere does the right to make fair use of copyrighted material appear to be mentioned, although in an aside on one page Espinel mentions that the administration wants to protect “legitimate uses of the Internet and… principles of free speech and fair process.”

This is the first annual report released by the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (official website) since its creation in late 2008 and the Senate confirmation of the first Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (“copyright czar”) in late 2009.  Although it covers a wide range of intellectual property issues, I will mostly limit this post to copyright-related items.

Here are some “highlights” from the report:

1.  Policy statement regarding Internet enforcement actions (pp. 5-6):

The debate over the proper role of government in the online environment extends to the issue of intellectual property enforcement: that is, reducing the distribution of pirated or counterfeit goods online or via the Internet, including digital products distributed directly over the Internet or physical products advertised or ordered via the Internet. The choices made in the area of intellectual property enforcement can have spillover effects for government action, regulation or intervention in other areas. Therefore, this office has given considerable thought to the best approach towards enforcement in the online environment. As outlined below, we believe the right approach is one that combines forceful criminal law enforcement with voluntary and cooperative action by the private sector consistent with principles of transparency and fair process. [emphasis added]

Almost as an after-thought, the report later notes (p. 7) that,

without mandating business models, we believe it is important to encourage the development of alternatives for consumers that meet their legitimate needs and preferences. We note some activity in the marketplace to develop new and more flexible methods of distribution and will look for opportunities to support those efforts.

2.  Summary of the current state of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (Wikipedia backgrounder) (pp. 22-23):

ACTA requires, among other things, that signatories establish effective intellectual property enforcement legal frameworks, including obligations to:

  • establish criminal procedures and penalties for willful trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy, or importation or use, on a commercial scale, and aiding and abetting criminal conduct, and authorizes criminalizing camcording;
  • establish laws that impose imprisonment and destruction as penalties for criminal violations of enforcement laws;
  • establish civil enforcement laws that enhance the tools available to rightholders to crack down on counterfeiting and piracy, including by providing for meaningful damages for rightholders, the destruction of counterfeit goods and also including appropriate safeguards against abuse and to protect privacy as appropriate;
  • ensure that civil and criminal enforcement laws are equally applicable to copyright infringement occurring online; and
  • establish anti-circumvention laws to protect the use of technological protection measures (digital locks).

3.  Summary of successful efforts to recruit private-sector actors into IP enforcement (pp. 27-28)

We believe that most companies share the view that providing services to infringing sites is inconsistent with good corporate business practice and we are beginning to see several companies take the lead in pursuing voluntary cooperative action.

For example, earlier this year, MasterCard withdrew services from Limewire, a well-known file-sharing site. In addition, MasterCard has done an internal assessment of its processes to address infringing sites and has begun a number of cooperative discussions with rightholders….On December 2, 2010, Google announced a number of steps it will take to make its response time to complaints more rapid, to limit the ability of websites used to sell infringing goods to obtain ad revenue and to increase access to legitimate sites….We need to eliminate financial gain derived from infringement. While some products are sold directly, other sites obtain revenue from advertising. The IPEC is in the process of gathering information about the online advertising business to see if there are means to limit illegal sites from using ad revenue as a business model.

4.  Statistical summary of (generally) increased investigations/enforcement/arrests/convictions/seizures (pp. 31-32):

  • In FY 2010, ICE HSI intellectual property investigations increased by more than 41% and ICE HSI arrests increased by more than 37% from FY 2009.
  • In FY 2010, FBI intellectual property investigations increased by more than 44% from FY 2009….
  • In FY 2010, courts sentenced 207 intellectual property defendants. More than half—121—received no prison term, 38 received sentences of 1-12 months in prison, 27 received sentences of 13-24 months in prison, 10 received sentences of 25-36 months in prison, 7 received sentences of 37-60 months in prison and 4 received sentences of more than 60 months in prison….
  • CBP and ICE HSI had 19,959 intellectual property seizures in FY 2010. The domestic value of the seized goods—i.e., the value of the infringing goods, not the  manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for legitimate product—was $188.1 million. The estimated MSRP of the seized goods—i.e., the value the infringing goods would have had if they had been genuine—was $1.4 billion.

***

A final note:  the report trumpets success–a lot.  Examples abound, but perhaps the most amusing is a case involving counterfeit Cisco equipment sold to the Marines for use in battlefield-critical networks in Iraq.  I’m certainly glad that the government caught this, but do they really have to mention it three separate times (on pages 5, 41, and 50) in the report?

Roundup of additional commentary:

Potential expansion for domain suffixes

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Even amidst discussions that the Internet has run out of addresses, there is talk about expanding the list of available domain suffixes beyond the current 21 options. It sounds like these proposals would allow for all sorts of suffixes and this, inevitably, leads to questions about who would get to control certain domains:

This massive expansion to the Internet’s domain name system will either make the Web more intuitive or create more cluttered, maddening experiences. No one knows yet. But with an infinite number of naming possibilities, an industry of Web wildcatters is racing to grab these potentially lucrative territories with addresses that are bound to provoke.

Who gets to run .abortion Web sites – people who support abortion rights or those who don’t? Which individual or mosque can run the .islam or .muhammad sites? Can the Ku Klux Klan own .nazi on free speech grounds, or will a Jewish organization run the domain and permit only educational Web sites – say, remember.nazi or antidefamation.nazi? And who’s going to get .amazon – the Internet retailer or Brazil?

The decisions will come down to a little-known nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., whose international board of directors approved the expansion in 2008 but has been stuck debating how best to run the program before launching it. Now, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is on the cusp of completing those talks in March or April and will soon solicit applications from companies and governments that want to propose and operate the new addresses.

Sounds like we could have some battles on our hands for particular suffixes. Perhaps the companies or organizations with the most money will win.

But many of the options in this article are set up as “good” options versus “bad” options. If given a choice, how many people would want the .nazi domain to be controlled by the Ku Klux Klan? And some of the other options presented in the story, such as whether someone who wants musicians and agents to be able to get .music addresses while the music industry wants to control this for their larger purposes, are less clear. ICANN, the organization who controls the domains, says they have considered this: “For people who might propose controversial domains – such as .nazi, which ICANN officials have worried about – approval will be based on the applicant’s identity and intentions, and on the grounds of “morality and public order.” How in the world will they be able to do this in a way that is satisfying to multiple parties? Is there a way to decide this before the domains are sold or are we simply in for long rounds of litigation?

Conference on faith among Catholic emerging adults

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A number of recent studies have focused on the religion of emerging adults, those who are roughly 18-29 years old and are making the transition from being teenagers to adults. Some of these findings and thoughts about Catholic emerging adults were shared at a recent conference:

Sociologist James Davidson, professor emeritus at Purdue University, said young Catholics “distinguish between the Catholic faith, which they identify with and respect, and the Catholic Church, which they are less attached to.”

Quoting a wide body of research, including his own, Davidson said eight of 10 young Catholics believe there are many ways to interpret Catholicism and they grant more authority to their individual experience than they do to the magisterium.

“They stress the importance of thinking for themselves more than obeying church leaders,” he said. “Instead of simply embracing church traditions and teachings, they tinker with them. They distinguish between abstract beliefs and principles that they think are at the core of the Catholic faith, and more concrete norms and codes of conduct that they consider optional or peripheral.”

In essence, Davidson said, “they believe that doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, Mary as the mother of God, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist and the need to be concerned about the poor are more important than teachings such as the need to limit the priesthood to men, the need for priestly celibacy, the church’s opposition to artificial birth control and its opposition to the death penalty.”

Catholic young adults are not immune to the complex encounter between the church and popular culture, said participants in a panel discussion on “Sex and the City of God.”…

There is some more interesting stuff here. These discussions sound very similar to the findings of Soul Searching and Souls in Transition: emerging adults are less interested in organized religion but are still spiritual even as this spirituality looks more like “moral therapeutic deism” and they question traditional (or conservative) stances of the church toward social issues.

Will a declining newspaper really lead to a loss of stature for Los Angeles?

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Newspapers across the United States have suffered circulation declines and employee layoffs in recent years. The Los Angeles Times has been no different and was even bought out by the Tribune Company. But can people really suggest that Los Angeles is losing stature because its primary newspaper is having trouble?

Since The Times was sold to Tribune, its newsroom staff has been cut in half. For many Angelenos, the downsizing is just one more sign that their city is losing stature. Add it to the list of other ego-bruising blows, like the loss of its professional football team, the flight of Fortune 500 companies from the city limits and a failed bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“We don’t even have a football team. So what does that tell you?” said Mr. Cheeseborough, a note of resignation in his voice.

The Times’s weekday circulation has been nearly halved since 2000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, falling to just over 600,000 — a far steeper rate of decline than at many other big dailies like The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press and The Washington Post.

To identify where all the local harrumphing comes from, it helps to understand just how closely the rise of The Times is associated with the rise of Los Angeles as a capital of culture and commerce.

The paper’s founding families, the Otises and the Chandlers, used their fledgling publication to push for the development that helped give rise to modern Los Angeles. Water was first piped into the San Fernando Valley because they arranged for it. Los Angeles Harbor was built in part because of their backing.

The suggestion here is that the newspaper decline is part of a recent serious of public failures. By invoking the founding families of the newspaper and their “growth machine”/boosterism efforts, the suggestion is the out-of-towners who manage the newspaper (from Chicago, no less) don’t care much about the city. And if the newspaper doesn’t care any more, then why should anyone in the city or outside the city care?

This argument seems spurious at best. There could be several things going on here:

1. There is resentment about a Chicago company owning the Los Angeles Times. Chicago and LA have had a long-term rivalry as Chicago almost overtook New York City in population in the 1890s (leading New York to annex all five boroughs into the city) and then Los Angeles grew tremendously after World War Two to overtake Chicago as the “Second City.” This is a matter of civic pride.

2. People who like newspapers or journalists are upset about the demise of the Times while the general population is not. Journalists tend not to like to see the decline of revered outlets. Could this just be journalists upset about the general decline of newspapers? The problems described in this story, less news, more ads, are emblematic of the entire industry.

3. This is simply bad timing. There is not a causal relationship here: the decline of the Los Angeles Times coincides with a number of other events.

In the end, do people really think that Los Angeles’ culture and commerce are going to decline precipitously in the near future because of its newspaper?