Are You On It?

Every generation has its defining psychiatric malady, confidently diagnosed from afar by armchair non-psychiatrists. In the fifties, all those gray-suited organization men were married to “frigid” women. Until a few years ago, the country of self-obsessed boomers and reality-TV fame-seekers and vain politicians and bubble-riding Ponzi schemers made narcissistic personality disorder—diagnosis code 301.81 in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition—the craziness of the moment. And who among us has not proudly copped to our own “OCD” or “ADD,” deemed a mercurial sibling “seriously bipolar,” written off an erratic ex as “obviously borderline,” or nodded as a laid-off friend pronounced his former boss a “textbook sociopath”? Lately, a new kind of head case stalks the land—staring past us, blurting gaucheries, droning on about the technical minutiae of his boring hobby. And we are ready with our DSM codes: 299.00 (autistic disorder) and 299.80 (Asperger’s disorder). (...)

But this is not a story about Asperger’s, autism, or the spectrum—those very real afflictions that can bring untold hardship to the people who suffer from them and to their families. It is, instead, a story about “Asperger’s,” “autism,” and “the spectrum”—our one-stop-shopping shorthand for the jerky husband, the socially inept plutocrat, the tactless boss, the child prodigy with no friends, the remorseless criminal. It’s about the words we deploy to describe some murky hybrid of egghead and aloof.

Like the actual clinical disorder, the cultural epidemic in scare quotes may have less to do with changes in the world than with changes in those seeing it. To some degree, the spectrum is our way of making sense of an upended social topography, a buckled landscape where nerd titans hold the high ground once occupied by square-jawed captains of industry, a befuddling digital world overrun with trolls and avatars and social-media “rock stars” who are nothing like actual rock stars. It is, as the amateur presidential shrinks would have it, a handy phrase for the distant, cerebral men with the ambition and self-possession necessary to mount a serious run for the White House. When quants and engineers are ascendant, when algorithms trump the liberal arts, when Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber tweet about the death of Steve Jobs, when the hyperspecialist has displaced the generalist and everyone is Matrix-ed into the Internet, it’s an Other-deriding tool to soothe our cultural anxiety about the ongoing power shift from humanists to technologists. As the coders inherit the Earth, saying someone’s on the spectrum is how English majors make themselves feel better.

But anxiety alone (generalized anxiety disorder: 300.02) doesn’t fully explain it. There’s something admiring, too, in the cultural uses of Asperger’s, which makes it different from the psych put-downs du jour of previous eras. The popular but mostly false image of Rain Man–like asocial geniuses (whether on the sitcoms Big Bang Theory and Community, say, or in best-selling books like Jodi Picoult’s novel House Rules and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short) has helped create a mystique around high-functioning autism, and the idea that Asperger’s offers selective advantages has midwifed a generation of self-outers: See, for example, Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page’s Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s, or contestant Heather Kuzmich’s appearances on America’s Next Top Model.

And so we find ourselves in a weird place. A psychiatric diagnosis first observed in four boys more than half a century ago has become common slang, a conceptual gadget for processing the modern world. Weirder still: At the same time it soothes the insecurities of those who would weaponize it as insult, it flatters the vanity of those who’d appropriate it as status credential.

by Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Illustration by Gluekit

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HMS Bounty: A Tall Ship’s Final Hours

The tall ship began to die early Monday morning in the hurricane-ravaged waters off the North Carolina coast. One of the HMS Bounty’s generators failed. Water flooded everywhere. The 180-foot-long, three-masted tall ship was losing power and propulsion.

By about 3 a.m., the Bounty’s once-optimistic Facebook page, which on Sunday had posted “So far so good!” in its daily updates, had issued a new message for its followers: “Your Prayers are needed.”

Ninety minutes later, the Bounty finally lost its battle with 40 mph winds and 18-foot seas. Its captain ordered all hands to abandon the sinking ship, a shocking demise for a celebrity vessel built for the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

The ship, which had been trying to make its way around Hurricane Sandy, carried a crew of 16. When the rescue operation ended about 10 a.m. Monday, 14 of the crew members had been saved by Coast Guard helicopters. Two people, Capt. Robin Walbridge, 63, and Claudene Christian, 42, were missing.

Christian’s body was recovered Monday night, but Walbridge remained unaccounted for.

The HMS Bounty, owned by New York businessman Robert Hansen, began its journey Thursday, departing from New London, Conn., for St. Petersburg, Fla., where the ship has docked for years. In addition to its star turns in the 2006 “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel and other Hollywood movies, the ship was used to teach the “nearly lost arts of square rigged sailing and seamanship,” its Web site said. It also offered sailing, teamwork and leadership classes for the general public.

On Saturday, Walbridge reported that he expected to face the hurricane’s brunt that night, according to the ship’s Facebook page. The HMS Bounty Organization, which ran the ship, knew its tall-ship devotees might be skeptical of the vessel’s path, so it tried to reassure its 8,000 Facebook followers.

“Rest assured that the Bounty is safe and in very capable hands,” the Facebook page’s administrator wrote. “Bounty’s current voyage is a calculated decision . . . NOT AT ALL . . . irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. The fact of the matter is . . . A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!”

But Sunday night, the hurricane was proving too much for the Bounty. The ship sent out a distress signal at 9 p.m., according to the Coast Guard. Two hours later, the HMS organization called the Coast Guard, confirming that it had lost radio contact with the vessel.

A Coast Guard C-130 aircraft arrived at the scene an hour later to make direct contact with the Bounty and survey the scene, about 90 miles off Cape Hatteras.

When the captain ordered everyone off the ship about 4:30 a.m., three people struggled to climb into the two lifeboats and were smacked by a wave, the Coast Guard said. One man fell into the water, but others pulled him into one of the boats. Walbridge and Christian were thrown into the water and disappeared.

While the HMS Bounty and its crew foundered in the dark, Steve Bonn was woken from a sound sleep in Camden, N.C., about 4:15 a.m. by his ringing cellphone. The 44-year-old Coast Guard helicopter pilot was needed for a mission: A big boat was sinking.

One rescue helicopter had already been dispatched. Bonn, who has rescued ship passengers near the cold waters of Alaska, boarded a Jayhawk chopper with three others: a co-pilot, a flight mechanic and 27-year-old rescue swimmer Daniel Todd.

The first rescue helicopter arrived about 6:30 a.m. Monday, found two lifeboats and focused on one of them. Bonn’s chopper showed up 45 minutes later, and he zeroed in on the second lifeboat, about a mile away from the other. Six people huddled inside.

Bonn piloted his Jayhawk about 50 feet from the life raft, he said, far enough so the propeller draft wouldn’t overturn the lifeboat. But close enough so Todd could quickly muscle his way to the lifeboat. Bonn and his team also had to move fast. They had about an hour to conduct the rescue so they could make it back to their air base without running out of fuel.

Bonn kept his chopper in place, while the flight mechanic lowered Todd into churning waters. Wearing a dry suit, the rescue swimmer shimmied into the black lifeboat.

“Hey, how are you all doing? I hear you need a ride,” he said he told the passengers. “There’s a couple things I need to know. Are you all accounted for? Who has injuries?”

by Ian Shapira, Washington Post |  Read more:
Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images

You Are Listening to New York

You Are Listening to New York
[ed. Click the play button at the top for NYPD radio stream, second button to change soundtrack.]
Photo: Zemlinki!

Peter McFarlane Circuit board fossils
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The Bookstore Brain

If you could create a bookstore, what would you put in it? What would you exclude? Would you specialize in any particular genre? Would your organizing principle be quantity or quality, or would you devise a way to have both?

Nearly all bibliophiles—that peculiar breed of people who feel more at home in bookstores than in their actual homes—have at some point posed such questions and daydreamed about the utopian store they would construct in answer to them, the store that would smoothly combine expertise and aesthetic preference with comfort and commercial viability.

Except for the quixotically determined few who actually open a store, most book lovers must be content to tend to the garden of their own libraries. But for a few years, I had the chance to put speculation into practice. I worked at Housing Works Bookstore, one of the retail arms of the venerable New York H.I.V./AIDS nonprofit that was started in the nineteen-eighties by members of ACT UP. Like the organization’s thrift stores, the bookstore is run largely by volunteers and receives its stock entirely from donations. So at any given time, crowded under the steam pipes of the store’s basement and sub-basement, are scores of boxes of books—from publishers or magazines getting rid of their overflow, from the apartments of lifelong readers who have died, or simply from the shelves of New Yorkers who need to clear space. In those boxes is the raw material to make a bookstore. My job was to sift their contents, relying on my tastes and book-floor experience to select the stock. And influenced by the same fond madness that allows booksellers to continue to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the book-buying public still wants their guidance, I am certain that you will be interested in reading an essay about book sorting. (...)

I have worked at four bookstores. Two were Barnes & Nobles, the unjustly maligned chain megastore. It’s true that the mind governing these stores is corporate, but the staff tends to be far better read and more informed than detractors allow, and the selection is large and egalitarian.

I worked, too, at the Strand bookstore, the Manhattan institution that boasts the impossible-to-verify claim of having eighteen miles of books. The Strand’s most distinctive characteristic is its lupine voracity. It opened on Book Row in the nineteen-twenties among dozens of other bookshops, but like some apex predator, it is the only one that has survived. It is hungry for your books—it wants to buy them cheap and sell them slightly less cheap. Watching the process is mesmerizing: A potential seller will appear and present the carefully culled fruits of his library. His books are instantly snatched up and spread like entrails over the counter. The grizzled buyers, who have worked at the store for decades, claw at them for a moment and then shout out a non-negotiable offer. Seconds later the man staggers away with two wrinkled tens and a kick in the behind. It’s rough handling, but the visitor benefits, because the sheer volume of the stock makes the browsing otherworldly.

But my favorite job was at Housing Works, where I stood at the sluice gates of the incoming book donations and was tasked with judging which ones would be elevated to the shelves on the book floor. Housing Works is a fascinating case study, because its floor inventory and its online inventory (also housed in the building’s basements) are separate entities. It’s almost like two bookstores in one—the first for browsing and surfing the serendipity of the stacks, the second for title-searched Internet ordering. On average there, thirty per cent of book sales are made in person and the remainder are made online. A book sorter needs to keep this ratio in mind when determining whether a book should go to the book floor or to the online division. Apart from that consideration, he follows his own lights. Here, for the curious, are some of the precepts that guided me.

by Sam Sacks, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Rudolf Dischinger -Gramophone, 1930
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Good Raymond

I met Raymond in the fall of 1977, not really so long ago, although of course almost half of that time he’s been gone. We met at one of those semi-fancy literary festivals that still take place in American universities. A mixed group of writers—poets and prosers—get themselves invited to a college campus (in this case it was S.M.U., in Dallas). Public readings go on every evening, panel discussions, classes with students in the afternoons, late nights in the Hilton Hotel bar with pals, occasionally some low-grade high jinks, nothing too serious—all of it on the cuff. It’s what occupies the space of a literary life outside of New York.

Ray and I were lesser lights in a larger group that included Philip Levine and E.L. Doctorow—distinct literary stars, even then. A friend of ours at S.M.U. had included us on the “faculty” as a way of putting some money in our pockets and giving us some needed exposure. I had published a novel the year before, to no special acclaim. Ray had published his first collection of stories, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” which had been nominated for the National Book Award.

I can honestly say I didn’t know who Raymond Carver was at the time. That his name would become a household word in the next ten years, his stories a standard for the form, and he himself elevated to the station of “the American Chekhov” did not seem quite evident then. (It’s difficult, of course, to re-create the condition of not knowing once experience has made so much known. It is, though, a phenomenon writers all puzzle about as we try to make made-up experience seem real.)

It’s possible I’d heard the name Ray Carver before, knew of some wild and woolly literary drinking episodes in the Bay Area or Iowa City, two places I knew little of. (I, improbably enough, lived in Princeton.) But I’m certain I hadn’t read a Carver story. I was thirty-three, and Ray was vaguely thirty-nine. Neither of us had much gotten our head up out of the foggy ether young writers live in—sometimes for years, sometimes forever—in which you’re indistinctly aware of a “writing world,” conscious of a few names on its periphery, a few stories, an occasional significant breakthrough into print, but mostly are just beavering away trying to make isolation and persistence into a virtue, and anonymity your sneak attack on public notice. (...)

Ray was my opposite, at least in appearance: a man who truly had other things on his mind. Ray Carver was hungry in 1977, and not for a square meal. You could also say he looked haunted. Bad things were not very far behind him, and he meant to be watchful. He laughed hurriedly, then slipped back into a kind of serious but uncertain reserve. His eyes darted a little. His big shoulders were slightly hunched. He seemed to want to come near you, to agree with you about something important you and he knew together, something literary, if possible—admiration for somebody’s book or poem—but not to come all the way to you. “Yes, yes, oh yes. Oh by God I couldn’t agree more.” His voice was hoarse, deep. His eyes would move away but find you again, as if he were testing something—your opinion of him. He seemed vulnerable, good. And everything—his clothes, his hands, his hair (if you put your hands on his shoulders, as we all did a lot then, and drew close)—everything smelled like smoke. Though everything did not smell like booze. Booze was over.

The night I met Ray he gave a reading in some big, cold and barny, echoing multipurpose room on the S.M.U. campus. Other people, even if I didn’t, seemed to know who Raymond Carver was, because lots of them turned up to listen. Ray read a story that was then called “What Is It?” and that is still my favorite. (Later, an overweening editor convinced Ray to call it “Are These Actual Miles?”—a terrible title for giving away the story’s keystone line.) The story concerns a couple on the brink of bankruptcy and dispossession who decide to sell their prized convertible (an emblem of palmier times) before whoever is going to foreclose or serve papers or slap a lien on them arrives at the door. She leaves to do the selling. He stays home, full of apprehension and loathing, drinking Scotch. The story, which is from “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” is shockingly brief—ten pages in my Vintage edition—especially in view of the broad emotional distances it traverses while still being full of memorable moments and lines. In the passage of an afternoon and evening, a man’s entire spiritual life is laid bare then bludgeoned in ways that make the reader both laugh and cringe: his marriage is possibly sacrificed to hardship; he is almost certainly cuckolded by a used-car dealer his wife has only that night become acquainted with; great fury and indignation are fruitlessly unleashed; his wife’s distaste for him is revealed. And, of course, his car is sold.

Ray read the story in near-dark conditions, hugely hunched over a glaring little podium lamp, constantly fiddling with his big glasses, clearing his throat, sipping water, beetling down at the pages of his book as if he’d never really thought of reading this story out loud and wasn’t finding it easy. His voice was typically hushed, seemingly unpracticed, halting almost to the point of being annoying. But the effect of voice and story upon the listener was of actual life being unscrolled in a form so distilled, so intense, so chosen, so affecting in its urgencies as to leave you breathless and limp when he was finished. It was a startling experience—wondrous in all ways. And one learned, from the story, many things: Life was this way—yes, we already knew that. But this life, these otherwise unnoticeable people’s suitability for literary expression seemed new. One also felt that a consequence of the story was seemingly to intensify life, even dignify it, and to locate in it shadowed corners and niches that needed revealing so that we readers could practice life better ourselves. And yet the story itself, in its spare, self-conscious intensity, was such a made thing, not like life at all; it was a piece of nearly abstract artistic construction calculated to produce almost giddy pleasure. That night in Dallas, Ray put on a blatant display of what a story could do in terms of artifice, concision, strong feeling, shapeliness, high and surprising dramatics. The story was definitely about something, and you could follow it easily—it was about what two people did in adversity which changed their lives. But here was no ponderous naturalism. Nothing extra. There were barely the rudiments of realism. This was highly stylized, artistic writing with life, not art, as its subject. And to be exposed to it was to be bowled over.

On the way out of the building into the watery Texas night, I came up beside Ray and patted him on the back. (We were always doing that.) “Gee,” I said, “that was a terrific story, Ray. And you read it just perfectly [hesitantly, painfully, reluctantly, almost inaccessibly, as if all the horrors and poignance and comedy were straight from true life, which they probably were].”

“Oh God, Richard, really?” Ray said, looking nearly astonished and grinning. “Did you like that? Did you? Oh Christ, I’m glad to hear that. I really am.” He stopped and shook his head. “I hadn’t read a story sober in longer than I can remember. Maybe never. I was shaking in my boots. I was afraid I couldn’t finish it. But that you liked it means the world to me. Thanks a lot, my friend. I’m pleased. I really am. Thanks. Thanks.”

by Richard Ford, The New Yorker (1998) |  Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia

The Bloody Patent Battle Over a Healing Machine

A patent royalty is a beautiful thing. It is so much sweeter than found money because it is more than just good luck. It means that one party is paying another to use an invention. And before the lawyers got to arguing over claim constructions and prior art, before the government regulators and hospitals screamed enough was enough, and before the Russians came to Texas to explain Soviet-era library policies, there were few things more beautiful or lucrative in the world of patent royalties than the VAC.

It's pronounced "vack" and stands for vacuum-assisted closure. Here's what it is: You cut a piece of foam to size and place it in a wound as a barrier and protector. Then you cover the wound and seal it up. One end of a tube goes through the seal and the other goes into a small pump. The pump produces negative pressure, creating an even vacuum through the foam, and the wound is pulled together and heals. If it sounds simple, it's because it is simple.

For much of the past 20 years this device was controlled by a San Antonio company called Kinetic Concepts Inc. The VAC transformed KCI from a second-tier medical manufacturer into a global juggernaut.

For Wake Forest University, which licensed the VAC patents to KCI, the device has meant about $500 million in royalties. Based almost entirely on the VAC deal, the university was ranked fifth by the Association of University Technology Managers in its most recent survey of licensing income, trailing only Columbia, New York University, Northwestern, and the University of California system. In recent years the KCI payments have propped up the bottom line of the university's medical center, and the VAC money has paid for research, recruiting, and construction that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.

As you might imagine, all that success gave KCI and Wake Forest a powerful incentive to build a fence, to protect the patents at all cost. And it gave everybody else an equally powerful incentive to find a way through the fence.

This is the story of what happens when there are billions of dollars wrapped up in a prosaic piece of technology that at its core is closer to your kid's science-fair entry than the Human Genome Project, one that despite all the commercial success and some 4 million or so patients still has its share of doubters in the medical community. It's a story about luck and timing and the squeezing of the health care dollar. It is about betrayal and wrangling over patents. And mostly it is about invention, the tenuous and uncertain act of breathing life into an idea that may or may not have been yours all along.

by Ken Otterbourg, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Josue Evilla

The Story Behind The Famous FedEx Logo, And Why It Works

My ten-year-old daughter points out the logo on a FedEx truck every time she sees one. She’s done that without fail ever since she learned to sound out letters. But she doesn’t do that with any other logo. What’s special about the FedEx logo isn’t the vibrant colors or the bold lettering. It’s the white arrow between the E and the x.

“There’s the white arrow that no one on my gymnastics team knows about,” she’ll say.

The FedEx logo is legendary among designers. It has won over 40 design awards and was ranked as one of the eight best logos in the last 35 years in the 35th Anniversary American Icon issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Nearly every design school professor and graphic designer with a blog has at some point focused on the FedEx logo to discuss the use of negative space. I wanted to hear the full history of how it all went down, not to mention impressing my daughter, so I called on Lindon Leader, the designer who created the mark in 1994 while working as senior design director in the San Francisco office of Landor Associates, a global brand consultancy known for executing strategy through design. Lindon now runs his own shop in Park City, Utah, where he continues to work the white space in creating marks and logos for a wide array of organizations.

We spoke at length about visual impact, his creative process, and his story of the FedEx logo development. I began by telling him how my daughter points out FedEx trucks when she sees them.

“It’s those kinds of stories that are the most gratifying for me, most rewarding,” he says. “I’m always asked what it’s like to see your work everywhere, and does it ever get old. It never does.” (...)

It was that kind of artistry that Lindon was after in developing the FedEx logo. “Back then, the company was still officially Federal Express,” he recalls. “The logo was a purple and orange wordmark that simply spelled out the name. By the way, people in focus groups thought it was blue and red, but it wasn’t. It had this incredible customer-created brand. Everyone said ‘FedEx’ and used it as a verb.” Although there was enormous cachet around the term, a global research study revealed that customers were unaware of Federal Express’s global scope and full-service logistics capabilities.

“People thought they shipped only overnight and only within the U.S.,” Lindon explains. “So the goal was to communicate the breadth of its services and to leverage one of its most valuable assets--the FedEx brand.” Lindon remembers that FedEx’s CEO, Fred Smith, placed high value on design and had an intuitive marketing sense: “Any designer worth a lick will tell you great clients make for great design. He said okay to a brand name change and authorized a new graphic treatment. He said do whatever we wanted, under two conditions. One was that whatever we did, we had to justify it: ‘You can make them pink and green for all I care; just give me a good reason why,’ he said. The second one was about visibility. ‘My trucks are moving billboards,’ he said. ‘I better be able to see a FedEx truck loud and clear from five blocks away.’ That was it! So off we went.”

by Matthew May, Fast Company Co.Design |  Read more:

Image via: Takedesigns

Diana Adams, Western Reaches, 2010.
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Killing the Computer to Save It

Many people cite Albert Einstein’s aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast.

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation’s leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems’ nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory.

“I’ve been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don’t want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

by John Markoff, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Jim Wilson

David Hockney, Pearblossom Highway, 1986.
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Vincent Desiderio
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What Does Ownership Mean?

On Monday, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that pits a major textbook publisher against Supap Kirtsaeng, a student-entrepreneur who built a small business importing and selling textbooks.

Like many Supreme Court cases, though, there's more than meets the eye. It's not merely a question of whether the Thai-born Kirtsaeng will have to cough up his profits as a copyright infringer; the case is a long-awaited rematch between content companies seeking to knock out the "first sale" doctrine on goods made abroad (not to mention their many opponents). That makes Wiley v. Kirtsaeng the highest-stakes intellectual property case of the year, if not the decade. It's not an exaggeration to say the outcome could affect the very notion of property ownership in the United States. Since most consumer electronics are manufactured outside the US and include copyrighted software in it, a loss for Kirtsaeng would mean copyright owners could tax, or even shut down, resales of everything from books to DVDs to cellphones.

"First sale" is the rule that allows owners to resell, lend out, or give away copyrighted goods without interference. Along with fair use, it's the most important limitation on copyright. So Kirtsaeng's cause has drawn a wide array of allies to his side. These include the biggest online marketplaces like eBay, brick-and-mortar music and game retailers, and Goodwill—all concerned they may lose their right to freely sell used goods. Even libraries are concerned their right to lend out books bought abroad could be inhibited.

John Wiley and Sons, the textbook publisher suing Kirtsaeng, has its share of backers as well, including the movie and music industries, software companies, and other book publishers. Those companies argue differential pricing schemes are vital to their success, and should be enforced by US courts. Nearly 30 amicus briefs have been filed in all.

Supporters of Kirtsaeng are mobilized, following an alarming—but not precedential—loss in an earlier case, Omega v. Costco. On a call with reporters this week, librarians and lawyers for pro-Kirtsaeng companies painted a stark picture of what might happen should he lose the case. If the appellate court ruling against Kirtsaeng is allowed to stand, they suggest copyright owners could start to chip away at the basic idea of "you bought it, you own it."

"This case is an attempt by some brands and manufacturers to manipulate copyright law, to control the distribution and pricing of legitimate, authentic goods," said eBay's top policy lawyer, Hillary Brill. "When an American purchases an authentic item, he shouldn't have to ask permission from the manufacturer to do with it what he wants."

Without "first sale" doctrine in place, content companies would be allowed to control use of their goods forever. They could withhold permission for resale and possibly even library lending—or they could allow it, but only for an extra fee. It would have the wild effect of actually encouraging copyrighted goods to be manufactured offshore, since that would lead to much further-reaching powers.

"When we purchase something, we assume it's ours," said Overstock.com general counsel Mark Griffin. "What is proposed by [the content companies] is that we change the fundamental notion of ownership rights."

by Joe Mullin, ARS Technica | Read more:

Photo: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Mosque of Najaf, Iraq
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Giorgio de Chirico, The Melancholy of Departure, 1916.
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Prisoners of Cable

On the Internet, news and entertainment famously want to be free. But in June, tens of thousands of people staged an online protest that was bizarre for its medium. They offered—begged, even—to pay an entertainment company for its content. Almost as strangely, the company told them: “No way.”

The Web site TakeMyMoneyHBO.com attracted more than 160,000 people in 48 hours, each one promising to pay HBO an average of $12 a month for its streaming app, HBO Go, which offers every episode of the channel’s original programming, plus movies, but is currently available only to cable subscribers. The cheeky site might seem insignificant, but it created a media firestorm around the question of cable TV’s future. Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, the media company that owns HBO, tried to dismiss the issue, saying, “The whole idea that there’s a lot of people out there that want to drop [cable] and just have a Netflix or an HBO—that’s not right.” And indeed, pay-TV services added 200,000 U.S. customers in 2011; HBO and Cinemax subscriptions grew by 7 million globally in the first half of this year.

The cable bundle is under increasing popular assault these days, at least as measured by Web diatribes and water-cooler complaints. Nobody likes to feel forced to buy more than they want, and cable television sticks us with eye-popping bills for hundreds of channels that we couldn’t possibly watch even if we wanted to. The argument behind TakeMyMoneyHBO.com and its ilk is that this massive bundle could be easily unraveled and sold à la carte, by channel or even by individual show, if we just broke free of cable’s monopoly. Alas, it isn’t so simple.

Your monthly TV bill—if you belong to one of the 83 percent of U.S. households that subscribes to a pay-TV service—is in fact three bundles nestled inside each other. Cable channels (such as TBS) are bundles of shows. Media companies (such as Time Warner, which owns TBS) offer bundles of channels that they refuse to sell one by one. Finally, pay-TV companies—which I’ll call cable companies for short, but which also include satellite companies like DirecTV and telcos like Verizon—bundle and sell the media companies’ offerings. When you pay $80 or so each month for cable, roughly half goes to the cable company to pay for the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure to transport the content, and the other half goes to the media companies, which divvy it up among channels.

When you turn on your television, there is a 95 percent chance that the channel you tune in to will be owned by one of just seven media companies, such as News Corp (which owns Fox News Channel) or Viacom (which owns Comedy Central). The Big Seven use their oligopolistic power to drive a hard bargain. Cable providers that want to run Viacom’s popular networks, like Comedy Central, must also agree to buy its less popular channels, like MTV2. After dealing with all seven media companies, the cable providers are left with something millions of households will recognize: a bloated offering of channels at an arrestingly high price. The bundle isn’t something Comcast or DirecTV invented to make their customers hate them. It’s something that the largest media companies demand, in take-it-or-leave-it fashion.

But media companies are not the only players with a big stake in the current system. Channels, too, find it congenial to their interests. HBO is a perfect example: Weaned off its media company, Time Warner, HBO would see its costs skyrocket. It would have to build a streaming infrastructure and pay for its own marketing, customer service, and billing. More than 90 percent of HBO’s content is viewed on a television, versus 1 percent through HBO Go. The channel is not about to blow up its business model for that 1 percent. (...)

The gadget war among the largest U.S. tech companies started on computers, shifted to phones and tablets, and is moving, slowly but certainly, back toward that original home screen: the television. Some tech evangelists pray that a swashbuckling disrupter might radically transform how (and how much) we pay for TV—the way the Internet made newspapers effectively free, or the way Napster and Apple forced music labels to sell their songs à la carte for 99 cents a pop.

But more bad news awaits these hopefuls. The tech giants now eyeing television—Apple, Google, Microsoft—don’t care about à la carte programming as some philosophical ideal. They see the television as the next logical battleground in the fight for your attention and your money, and their plans do not intuitively lead to an anti-bundling strategy.

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Van Aelst