Stifling Creativity

Eugene Zinovyev (A UC Berkeley undergrad):

Today, entertainment lobby groups are consciously trying to prevent technological and creative progress in the United States.
Late in March, Ted Olson, the former solicitor general under the current President Bush and counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing against peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, likening them to services that allow users to exploit others’ property illegally with no legal repercussion. Yet, the analogy between his scenario and the sharing of music and movies is deeply flawed, because digital movies and songs are not property in the same sense that a car or a pair of shoes are.

Lind: 17th Century Spain = 21st Century USA?

William S. Lind:

When people ask me what to read to find an historical parallel with America’s situation today, I usually recommend J. H. Elliott’s splendid history of Spain in the first half of the 17th century, The Count-Duke of Olivares: A Statesman in an Age of Decline. One of the features of the Spanish court in that period was its increasing disconnection with reality. At one point, Spain was trying to establish a Baltic fleet while the Dutch navy controlled the Straits of Gibraltar.