voiceless

This is enough to warrant coming out of hibernation. Months after suspending its litigation campaign against individual file-sharers, a jury Friday awarded the RIAA $1.92 million against a 32-year-old Minnesota woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa. Toward the end of the Associated Press story on the verdict, Tom Sydnor, director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Center for the Study of Digital Property, was heard to say:

Legally acquiring a license to give copies of a song to potentially millions of Kazaa users might well have cost $80,000 per song.

If you still believe that the Internet's worldwide reach implies that every Jane Q. Public has effective access to millions of users, I have some dotcom business plans from 1998 to sell you.

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Today is Google's 10th birthday. In celebration, the site has made the 2001 version of its search engine available. And so we can present here, in full, Sarah Palin's Google presence in 2001, five years into her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (click to enlarge):

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We've known for months now that John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer, so it should come as no surprise that he talks about innovation policy as if it's an entirely new concept. We want a more efficient hybrid car battery, so let's pull a number out of the air -- $1 per U.S. citizen sounds good -- and award it as a prize to the person who invents one:

“I further propose we inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people,” Mr. McCain said, “by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

He said the winner should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs. “That’s one dollar, one dollar, for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency,” he said.

And shame on Sen. Barbara Boxer for calling this a "gimmick." It's not like the federal government provides any form of ex post incentive for technological innovation already, does it?

The National Review loves the idea, of course. Conservatives just love it when government gets into the business of picking winners and losers in the competition for innovation. (Then again, maybe not.)

Supreme Court denials of cert shouldn't be such big news, but the media has been all over yesterday's dismissal of CBC Marketing v. Major League Baseball, on appeal from the Eighth Circuit. My comments on the district court decision are here.

We're starting to see some of the first glimpses of the GOP strategy against Obama for the November election, and it isn't pretty. As Talking Points Memo summarizes (Youtube video -- relevant section starts at about 2:30 in), the real attack is going to focus on four falsehoods:

-- Obama is a Black nationalist
-- Obama is a crypto-Muslim
-- Obama has ties to terrorists
-- Obama is anti-American

Socially conscious Asian Americans should find this litany very familiar. For "Black nationalist," read "clannish and cliquish." For "crypto-Muslim" read "dog-eating, foot-binding male chauvinists." For "ties to terrorists" read "spies for communist China." For "anti-American" read "perpetual foreigners who can never be real Americans."

Obama may have succeeded in downplaying racial issues thus far in the campaign, but this summer and fall, he will be up against nothing less than the full arsenal of racial animus and oppression that largely defines the Asian American experience. Our experience should warn us about just how durable and insidious these attacks can be. Let's hope he overcomes, and in doing so, shows us all the way forward.

Addendum (10/1): Jeff Yang has similar thoughts.

What a difference a day makes.

2/20: Democratic thinkers ponder how to redefine McCain (McClatchy Newspapers)

2/21: McCain and the Lobbyist (Guardian)

P.S. Obligatory cyberlaw content: Is Lessig really running for Congress?

The timing of Microsoft's $45 billion bid for Yahoo! may have as much to do with the impending departure of the Microsoft-friendly Bush administration as it does with the software giant's strategic plans.

Given the antitrust agencies' easy approval of Google's Doubleclick acquisition, it appears that "flat Web" thinking has taken hold in Washington. This is the notion that there are no barriers to entry or growth of Web-based companies, simply because of the Web's open architecture and massive scale. But if that is so, why hasn't Microsoft been able simply to grow its own Web presence to the size it desires? It's certainly not for lack of trying.

It's hard to see any merger-specific synergies resulting from this transaction. This is plainly a grab for Internet traffic so that Microsoft can continue to defend its Windows/Office monopoly against nascent Web-based alternatives. Technologically speaking, there are no new products or services Microsoft can offer to the 27% of Web users visiting Yahoo.com every day that it couldn't already have delivered to the 18% who visit MSN.com.

Even so, Yahoo's stock price indicates that Wall Street is pretty sure this deal is going to go through, and I have to agree. Our current breed of antitrust enforcers, who have already decided that the Web is flat and that media concentration is no longer possible, will define a broad market and assign tiny market shares to MSN and Yahoo. Meanwhile, the Microsoft-free world just got a whole lot smaller today.

From the Washington Post's Reliable Source column:

Ever wonder how Alan Greenspan managed to land a much younger babe like Andrea Mitchell? Now revving up the promotional machine for his new book, the former Fed chairman and his now-wife divulge in a "60 Minutes" interview, to air Sunday on CBS, how he got her back to his apartment after that first dinner date in 1984.

According to Mitchell, he told her he wanted "to show me an essay he had written."

"On what?" asks interviewer Lesley Stahl.

"Antitrust," says Mitchell. "Monopolies."

"On the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890," clarifies Greenspan.

"You know how to woo a girl," says Stahl.

"It worked," says Greenspan.

(Thanks to Bert Foer.)