Soup | Anthony De Rosa

*82

Zach Gailifianakis interviews indie rocker Michael Showalter

*27

Glenn Beck and Fox News, here’s some show prep for you. (via @ogamble)

*4

Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.

- Mark Cuban, Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart = Twitter has changed it all. « blog maverick (via caterpillarcowboy)

*10

This hostility must seem perfectly sensible if you’re an old man who has your secretary find and print up Web pages on your behalf. But here’s a pro tip, Rupert: Old media doesn’t instant message those pages to your assistant’s Twitter, via Blogger, on AOL. She just does what your newspaper reporters and Fox News producers and sales executives and tabloid editors and attack-dog flacks and mid-level accountants do all the time every day: Sticks a hot, throbbing search query into Google and gets busy with a bunch of strange website she doesn’t subscribe to. Welcome to the internet.

- Ryan Tate

*38

Among overthinky legal types (i.e., law professors), there are many who argue that Fair Use only exists because it is occasionally difficult to make a socially-desirable use of someone else’s copyrighted material. By “difficult,” I mean “burdened by transaction costs that make the whole license-getting process a real pain in the ass.” And by “transaction costs,” I mean “lawyers.”

Example: a college professor wants to include a Wall Street Journal article in a hand-out. By making a hundred copies of the article and passing them around class, he is committing copyright infringement. However, the Fair Use Doctrine gives him a compelling defense, because we want our children to learn, etc. The market failure theory argues that, no, it’s still copyright infringement, because there’s some actual market price the professor can and should pay for licensing the article. Only thing is, the steps the professor needs to take to acquire such a license (the kaching of hiring a lawyer and the time spent negotiating the rights) make the cost of doing so like a thousand times higher than the license fee itself. For an economist, this level of inefficiency is the moral equivalent of incest. The social value of the infringement is higher than the icky waste of resources, and thus we consider such infringement to be “fair.”

Now it’s easy to see where this goes. If transaction costs drop to zero, then there’s no reason to get all outraged and shit. Enter the Internet, and rights clearinghouses, and micropayments — all things that cut down on the wasteful lawyer fees and allow a more perfect licensing market to develop. If the actual cost to a professor to acquire a license to that Wall Street Journal article is $10, with no transaction costs, and the time it takes to acquire the license is the five minutes spent clicking on a few links and the PayPal, well, then ipso facto Q.E.D. thus and therefore there’s no need to justify copyright infringement. Fair Use becomes unnecessary, economically speaking.

Ironically, much of what Google is doing to make it easier to buy shit is in fact eroding the Fair Use doctrine that they’ll likely try to hide behind when Murdoch lawyers up.

For those of you interested in boring yourself further, the seminal article on this is Wendy Gordon’s Fair Use as Market Failure, which is filled with hilarious references to Betamax tapes because it was written in 1982.

- Spiegelman (in reference to Rupert Murdoch’s attack on fair use)

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Jason Calacanis on How To Kill Google

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There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe can be challenged in the courts and will bar it altogether.

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Rupert Murdoch (via ericmortensen)

Can someone sit Rupe down and explain to him how The World Works Now?

*3

Killeen Daily Herald: Shooting turns Fort Hood Street into a 'ghost town'

kaytee:

I know there’s been a lot of coverage of the shooting, but this article is particularly special to me. It was written by Matt Goodman, one of my best friends who recently started writing for the Killeen Daily Herald after graduating in May.

Other than Matt, I have a handful of friends at Fort Hood and have had family members there in the past. Pretty much everyone I know knows someone who is there now or has been in the past… This whole incident just hit so close to home for me. It’s truly heartbreaking. I hope you’ll all continue to keep Fort Hood in your thoughts.