MGM v. Grokster Comes to Washington

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as today's Heritage Foundation panel on MGM v. Grokster again illustrated.

Collected in one room were conservative heavyweights like columnist Jim Pinkerton, former Solicitor General Ted Olson and former Attorney General Ed Meese, alongside Hollywood representatives David Green of the Motion Picture Association of America, Paul Skrabut of ASCAP, Rick Carnes of the Songwriters Guild, and Jim Ramo of MovieLink (a licensed alternative to Grokster), brought together in a coalition to defend intellectual property rights as well as real property rights. They even had RNC chief Ken Mehlman at the lunch, presenting an award to Congressman Lamar Smith. So Hollywood and the Right appear to be on the same side for a change.

On the other side, actually sitting in the audience, were representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, some big high-tech players, and their lawyers. Apparently there is big money from telephone companies, cable companies, and ISPs who don't want to be held liable for illegal uses of their services.

And in the middle? Well, a very intelligent-sounding lobbyist from Microsoft sat a couple of seats from me in the audience, he was noncommittal when I asked him what side the giant was taking...

In any case, it looks like March 29th will be a big day at the Supreme Court--peer-to-peer downloading of music and movies is going on trial (the Napster case ended before it reached the Supreme Court). Question at issue: Will the US government ban a technology that is used to commit theft of intellectual property, or not?

As a blogger and non-participant in this case, a believer in copyright as well as fair use, my guess is the answer lies somewhere between the positions of the two parties . Surely, there must be a way to make peer-to-peer distribution pay in such a way that royalties can be collected for the creators, while permitting new technologies to be developed and used. Will the Supreme Court come up with such a solution?

The best presentation was by songwriter Rick Carnes, (I asked him for a copy to post on this blog). He pointed out that the notion of "intellectual property" is unpopular in law schools these days, Duke just got a $2 million dollar grant to fight against it, and some 400 Yale students rallied in opposition. They see it as a plot by big corporations... Carnes suggested that one problem might be that the word "intellectual" is off-putting.

My suggestion, how about calling it "Creative Property?"

And for all those "Creative Commons" people out there: other than pasture for sheep and some vegetable gardens, which great inventions or works of art, exactly, came out of the commons, prior to their enclosure?

Think carefully...

Karen Hughes' New Job

The appointment of Karen Hughes to head the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs sends an important signal: President Bush cares about what the State Department is doing. Secretary of State Rice made all the right noises about the importance of public diplomacy. But will she follow up the words with action?

Obviously, Hughes, a former TV reporter and PR advisor to the President, is a top-drawer choice. But her high profile cuts both ways. Two previous appointees have failed in the job: ad agency executive Charlotte Beers and Jim Baker favorite Margaret Tutweiler. Hughes is taking along Dina Habib Powell, who worked in the White House Personnel office, staffing the Bush administration. She's an Egyptian-American from Texas who worked at one time for Dick Armey, so another highly-connected appointment. The clan system seems to be working full-speed, with personal, political and regional loyalties covered (Hughes is basically from Texas, although she lived in Panama, Canada and France).

While Hughes was certainly effective in the White House, and got George W. Bush re-elected (with a little help from hapless John F. Kerry and Bob Shrum) there is still an open question as to whether she will be able to function as effectively at Foggy Bottom, famous as a "fudge factory".

I'll feel a little better if Hughes finds The Diplomad and puts his blog back online asap -- officially, at http://www.state.gov...

Is Bush Losing the Global War on Terror?

That's the question at the center of Dale C. Eikmeier's article in Middle East Quarterly :

If the U.S. government is to develop successful counterinsurgency strategies, its policymakers and military strategists must understand the Islamist insurgency's mixture of subversion, propaganda, and military pressure. U.S. counterinsurgency strategy should be comprehensive. Any effort that lacks an ideological component will fall short. Militant Islam is competing for the minds of the Muslim masses; Washington must, too. While Western media focuses upon the latest acts of Islamist terror or questions over the human costs of military actions, Islamists recognize that the side that best promotes its ideas will be the victor. The ideological component in the strategy to defeat will be key to Western democracies' success.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government continues to fumble its public diplomacy. When State Department and Central Intelligence Agency policies fail to match and even contradict White House rhetoric, the effectiveness of U.S. efforts in the Middle East suffers. The U.S. government is also hampered in its battle to win the ideological struggle when it is unable to make its voice heard. In Iraq, the U.S. government simply ceded the airwaves to its opponents. Before the first bombs fell on Baghdad, the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite channel was set to operate throughout Iraq, with correspondents and equipment spread throughout the country. Al-Manar, the satellite channel of Lebanese Hezbollah, also operated freely throughout Iraq. The Iranian government inaugurated Al-'Alam, an Arabic language television station for Iraq, months before coalition forces launched their own television station.[8] As a result, both Sunni Islamists and Iranian proxies had a virtual free hand to shape the news for the Iraqi audience.

Saudi officials, the primary financial backers of militant Islam, have long understood the need to fight and win the battle for ideas. They sponsor the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) not only in Iraq and the Middle East, but also in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.[9] In the mountains of northern Iraq, IIRO mosques have sprouted up in small towns and villages where not a single dollar of American aid money had been spent more than a year after the fall of Baghdad. Given the organization, dedication, energy, and financial strength of opponents to the community of secular, liberal, and democratic states, U.S. strategy will fail if it focuses only upon capturing and killing insurgents but ignores the battle of ideas.

Victor Davis Hanson on American Audacity

From VDH's Private Papers:

A Look Back
Turning point since September 11
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
I know that things are going pretty well in America's efforts in the Middle East when Fareed Zakaria, who was a sharp critic over the last two years, now assures us that events are working out in Iraq � just about, he tells us, like he saw all along. Joseph Nye intones that at last Bush came around to his very own idea of 'soft power,' while Jackson Diehl gushes that Bush was sort of right all along � to nods of approval even from Daniel Schorr.
Even former Clinton National Security Council member Nancy Soderberg recently lamented to Jon Stewart, 'It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.' And then she added, 'Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's still hope for the rest of us....There's always hope that this might not work.'
This newfound turnabout follows the successful election and its aftershocks in the region. Before then, it had become a sort of D.C.-insider parlor game to look back at the conflict in the aftermath of September 11 and catalogue our mistakes.
Without much appreciation that error is the stuff of war, that by any historical benchmark the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was nothing short of miraculous, that our ongoing assessments of success and failure changed hourly within the fluid 24-hour newscycle, or that acrimonious hindsight was often used to save face about earlier wrongheaded pronouncements, we continued to tally up the 'I told you so's.'

Jamey Turner Plays the Glass Harp

Last Friday, we attended an unusual concert at Washington, DC's Arts Club: Jamey Turner on the Glass Harp.

Turner is a somewhat eccentric Montanan, who grew up in a musical family, trained as a clairinetist, and took up the glass harp as a result of a youthful vision. He's been on the Tonight show as well as played with symphony orchestras. His concert reminded me of variety acts on the Ed Sullivan show, the type of innocent musical entertainment we don't see much of anymore. His concert was more of a lecture demonstration--it might have been even better if it had been a pure recital. (Turner is so enthusiastic about his instrument, he spent half the performance explaining how it worked and answering questions.)

The glass harp, made up of water-filled crystal goblets, was a favorite of the 18th-Century. It is an amazing instrument to see and hear, sort of magical, and yet scientific at the same time. Amazing that the music comes from drinking glasses. Benjamin Franklin invented a mechanical version, and Thomas Jefferson enjoyed its sound. Mozart composed numbers especially for the Theramin-like sound. A bit gimmicky, a bit of a novelty act--yet one that is hundreds of years old, and part of classical music history.

You can listen to Jamey Turner's concerts at the Kennedy Center on this website.

Is 60 Minutes Doing Something Right?

Roger L. Simon thinks so. He's plugging a segment hosted by Morley Safer tonight, about murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh:

Hollywood remains shamefully silent or ignorant or both (I'm betting on both!) on the death of fellow filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who directed the short film 'Submission' and had his throat cut for his work by an Islamist psychokiller in Amsterdam. No mention of this event at the Academy Awards.

But now, according to a press release, at least '60 Minutes' is going to report on the case this Sunday and show part of the film, which harshly criticizes some Islamic attitudes towards women.

Funny how Safer is looking better and better . . .

A Kasparov v. Putin Match

Now this is interesting news from Russia, from a headline in the Telegraph: Kasparov quits chess to challenge Putin. And here's the lead: "Garry Kasparov, the world's leading chess player, is to give up competitive chess and devote his time to Russian politics in an attempt to bring down the increasingly despotic regime of President Vladimir Putin."

Remember this: chess is the national game of the former Soviet Union (the current world champion is a native of Uzbekistan). When I taught in Moscow and Tashkent, I learned that Russians treat chess the way Americans view poker. (One might see the end of the Soviet Union as checkmate by the USA). There is a wonderful silent Soviet film, by Vsevolod Pudovkin, called Chess Fever, that gives a sense of the grip of this game on the Russian public--then and now (chess matches are still televised as sport).

How a Kasparov-Putin match will play out, we can't predict, but it is indeed interesting news, and a fair match (Putin is no dummy).

More on MoMA's Nazi Loot

Just got this email from Alice Marquis, commenting on the David D'Arcy controversy:

I went to that site & found that the issue in question was about a work by Egon Schiele. This is not what I referred to in my book (Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the modern). I dealt with paintings stolen from museums by the Nazis and auctioned in Switzerland in, I think, 1940. American art dealers were boycotting the auction, but Alfred Barr [in the only underhanded act I ever found] got a NY dealer to go there and got Abbie Rockefeller to give him money to buy four paintings. Which he did, and the museum still owns them. Barr later was quite open about his regrets for having done that.... I also had a letter published by the NY Times about those stolen paintings. I also tried to follow up with the European museums from which the Nazis had stolen those paintings. Art News was interested in an article about it. However, a Berlin Museum which had lost one or two paintings was no longer in existence. I then saw the curator of the Essen Folkwang Museum and asked him about those pictures. And he said: "Well, we have a nice relationship with the MoMA and I'd hate to spoil it with a complaint about stolen pictures." So that was that.
I'd certainly be interested in contacting D'Arcy. As for Morley Safer, he once called me to get a detail on something to do with art, I forget what, and I helped him out. But when I sent him a copy of "The Art Biz," nothing happened, not even a Thank You. The arrogance of old men!

More on NPR Terminating David D'Arcy

From Jan Herman's blog on ArtsJournal:

Tyler Green mentioned it this morning in a brief post in his ArtsJournal blog, which is how I learned of the news. Coincidentally, I've just received a message (pointing out the story) from a very unhappy West Coast radio producer who is outraged by NPR's action and is seeking support for D'Arcy: "Jan, This is an awful story about one cultural institution exerting its prestigious might and another, a respected journalistic entity, rolling over and playing dead. It's been roiling for about a month but efforts to resolve the case have not moved NPR to listen to reason."

Another interesting angle is that when I met D'Arcy over 20 years ago, he was freelancing for NPR. I was under the impression that if he did a good job, they would hire him in a permanent position. Yet over two decades later, I read he was "terminated" from a freelance position. So where's the career path for art critics at NPR? And they call it cultural and educational broadcasting?

NPR Terminates Critical Art Critic...

Artnet.com reports: "In a letter to the NPR board, Morley Safer suggests that the broadcaster 'has caved in to intimidation by a large, wealthy and powerful cultural institution.'" New York's MoMA reportedly was unhappy with a story David D'Arcy did about Nazi loot displayed in the museum, and let NPR know about it (D'arcy's charge is nothing new, in her biography of the museum's founder, Alice Goldfarb Marquis documents Alfred Barr's purchases of stolen Jewish works at Swiss auctions).

NPR, where D'Arcy has been a freelance contributor for 20 years, gave D'Arcy a two-paragraph "termination" memo accusing him of overlooking "basic standards of journalism" in the report. D'Arcy says adamantly that "MoMA was not able to find any inaccuracies in the report, and the correction aired and posted by NPR does not address any inaccuracies.

I met D'Arcy many years ago in New York. And Morley Safer gave me an interview for my PBS book. So it will be interesting to see how this story plays out. I'd love to cover the trial, if D'Arcy sues NPR...

Virginia, not Vienna, Doctors Cured Yuschenko

That's one revelation from this fascinating story about Yuschenko's medical treatment in today's Washington Post. Poison experts from the University of Virginia diagnosed and treated Dioxin poisoning in the Ukrainian leader. The story reads like something out of a James Bond movie. It was interesting to learn of the role in the drama played by the American Ambassador to the Ukraine, John Herbst, who had been in Uzbekistan when we lived there. Maybe this will become a movie-of-the-week?

Samuelson on Social Security Reform

This oped in today's Washington Post, by Robert Samuelson, does a good job of explaining why some people are worried that President Bush's Social Security proposals might have adverse unintended consequences. Samuelson's article has a good title Welfare vs. Wall Street The bottom line:

What looms is a massive expansion of government power over Wall Street. To be sure, it would occur gradually, over decades, and its outlines are murky. The irony is that it comes from "conservatives."

More on Giuliana Sgrena

This interesting tidbit by Dutch reporter Harald Doornbos comes via Little Green Footballs:

'You don't understand the situation. We are anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, communists,' they said. The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers, the enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear.'

(Doornbos tells them they're out of their mind.)

But they knew better. When we arrived at Baghdad Airport, I was waiting for a jeep from the American army to come pick me up. I saw one of the Italian women walking around crying. An Iraqi had stolen her computer and television equipment. They were standing outside shivering, waiting for a cab to take them to Baghdad.

With her bias Sgrena did not only jeopardize herself, but due to her behavior a security officer is now dead, and the Italian government (prime minister Berlusconi included) has had to spend millions of euros to save her life. It is to be hoped that Sgrena will decide to have a career change. Propagandist or MP perhaps. But she should give up journalism immediately.

RGGU Russo-American Center

Here's the website for the place I taught American Culture in Moscow, theRussian State Humanitarian University Russo-American Center for Academic American Studies.

This Time, The New York Times Gets It Right...

I had to chuckle at this letter to the editor in today's New York Times, Commercial-Free PBS:

To the Editor:
A Feb. 21 editorial about PBS and its stations said 'the need for money to pay for expensive shows' has driven PBS 'to sell commercial time.' In fact, PBS and its stations are prohibited from selling commercial time by the terms of their broadcast licenses.
Many public television programs are supported by corporate underwriting. But all underwriting credits must be in keeping with the noncommercial nature of public television, which means that our credits must be free of such promotional conventions as calls to action, superlative description or qualitative claims, price information and endorsements, among others.
We are proud to note that our programs remain uninterrupted and are surrounded by a minimum of clutter. In one hour, PBS viewers see an average of 5 1/2 minutes of underwriting and program promotion messages. That stands in contrast to other broadcasters and cable networks, which are averaging nearly 20 minutes of nonprogramming time per hour.
Earlier this month, a national Roper survey showed that the American public trusts PBS more than any other national institution and believes that our programming is the most important on television. We are grateful for the country's belief in us and in our public service mission.
Lea Sloan
Vice President, Media Relations
Public Broadcasting Service
Alexandria, Va., Feb. 25, 2005

Maybe PBS could use this letter in their commercials. The new corporate slogan might go something like this:

"PBS: If the New York Times won't believe us, who will?"

Anne Applebaum on John Bolton

From today's Washington Post:

The trouble with many U.N. defenders is that they refuse to see this fundamental problem, and demand a constantly expanding role for the United Nations without explaining how its lack of democratic accountability is to be addressed. The trouble with many U.N. detractors, in Congress and elsewhere, is that they see the corruption and nothing else. But there is a role for U.N. institutions -- in Afghanistan, or in international health -- as long as that role is limited in time and cost. And there is a desperate need for U.N. reform. In defense of John Bolton: He may, if he can get confirmed, be one of the few U.N. ambassadors who has thought a good deal about how to set such limits and make such reforms. And if he isn't invited to a few cocktail parties along the way, at least he won't mind.

A Glimpse of a Glittering Inheritance

By Charlie Clark

Twenty-three years after my father died, his old tuxedo still hung in the storage room of my mother’s Northwest Washington apartment building. While preparing for her move recently, I decided on whim to take the perennially fashionable garment to be resuscitated at the dry cleaners.

It came out spiffy as new, well-textured and manly with its shiny black piping and wainscoted white shirt. It was, however, clearly too small for my expanded adult body. So I determined that with great fanfare at the next family gathering, I would present it to my older, and skinnier, brother.

We both would be aware of the penguin suit’s symbolism. He and my father were for many years estranged—removed from each other’s company (though not the other’s influence) by a complex stew of the political and the personal. One of the many concrete results was that my brother went through adulthood lacking the slightest desire to dress like a bourgeois man about town.

But in that puzzlingly indirect way so favored by fate, my brother, as he entered his 50s, decided to take up the hobby of swing dancing. Suddenly, a crisp black tux seemed just the thing.

So it was on a Sunday afternoon in the living room of my Arlington home, with various relatives looking on, I unveiled the freshened garment. My brother repaired to try it on. When he reappeared, he was glowing with the rest of us as he marched and modeled the perfect fit. A minute later, he had folded the tux back on its hanger and hung it lovingly in the backseat of his car.

An hour later, a caravan of us had parked our cars downtown in Adams Morgan, warmed by a feeling of family solidarity, to attend an aunt’s art gallery opening.

Emerging two hours later, we walked back down Columbia Road to find my brother’s car with its side window shattered. The tuxedo was gone, along with an expensive leather coat, some shoes, and a cell phone.

In this city so conversant with murders and assaults, I couldn’t react as if this were the crime of the century. I remembered that over the years I’ve personally been fortunate to have suffered very few crime victim experiences. When we were newlyweds, my wife once had her purse lifted out of our foyer—presumably by somebody who knocked on the door while we were out of earshot—and it was later found, sans cash, in a U.S. mailbox. More recently, the car my daughter drives had its taillights smashed and its tires sliced while parked overnight in our driveway, the result of some high school drama we never quite got to the bottom of.

Yet what our family on that recent Sunday did have in common with victims of more serious crimes is that we had to swallow the bitter potion of adjusting to the unpleasantness. We went through the same stages of denial, anger, resignation and acceptance caused by every random dose of unfairness or unforeseen detour that inflicts that lingering feeling of having been violated.

After a fruitless search through Adams Morgan back-ally dumpsters, my brother bucked himself up to file a claim with his insurance company.

The rest of us were left with no choice but to savor that earlier spectacle of my brother welcoming into his life a very special inheritance from our father. That brief, shining moment, still counts.

Be Careful What You Wish For...

You may get it, says Daniel Pipes.

In the Middle East, Pipes warns, a rush to "democracy," in societies unprepared for it through education and experience, may result in Islamic extremists seizing power as they did in Iran after the fall of the Shah in 1979.

Something to think about...

No Deals for Maskhadov...

SiberianLight: Chechen leader Maskhadov dead: "Chechen leader Maskhadov dead
News is just breaking that Chechen rebel President Asland Maskhadov is dead. Colonel Ilya Shabalkin told the press that he was killed as a result of an operation by Russian special forces. Thanks to Pete Leonard for the heads-up. "

John Bolton for UN Ambassador

I don't ordinarily endorse Presidential appointments, but the news that John Bolton has been tapped for UN Ambassador is wonderful.

While we were living in Tashkent, during the early days of the Iraq war, we watched Bolton field some really insulting and stupid questions on BBC World Service Television (it may have been on Tim Sebastian's "Hard Talk," not sure, but Bolton's interviewer certainly was a bully and a dope). Bolton did a great job, answering each attack, rationally, calmly and firmly. His tormentor didn't score a single point. So I think Bolton could hold his own in the UN.

Those worried about Bolton's chances for confirmation should note that Bolton has already been confirmed a number of times for government jobs. To get through the Senate before, and not now, would be very rare. So I think his chances are better than predicted.

Also, Bolton was my editor at Common Sense, a now-defunct Repubican "journal of ideas." Bolton was a good editor, and his managing editor, Claudia Weill, was terrific. At the time some people told me: "One day he'll be Secretary of State." Well, I don't know of a UN Ambassador who has become Secretary of State, but if one could, it might be Bolton. The whole thing was shut down as collateral damage from some typically stupid Republican fund-raising scandal involving Haley Barbour. Which is a shame, because now there is no Republican journal of ideas, and Republicans don't seem too interested in ideas. After that, Bolton went on to become vice-president at AEI (full disclosure, I asked him for a job, had an interview -- and nothing happened).

Here's a quote from Bolton's official State Department biography: "He graduated with a B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University and received his J.D. from Yale Law School. "

Of course Bolton's qualified--and that he's an outspoken UN critic means more than he's the right man for the job, it means watching Bolton at work on TV might be fun...