Stilltitled

The anti-piracy industry is nowadays a thriving one, with aspects including prevention, detection, enforcement, and, not least, lobbying for new laws and policies….

The practice of policing creative property has repeatedly triggered the redefinition of that property itself….

It would be ironic if the greatest revision of intellectual property’s nature in 150 years were to be set in train by the very measures adopted to preserve it sacrosanct.

—Adrian Johns, professor, University of Chicago: via WP. Particularly relevant now, as we witness the lurching and disruptive impact of the internet on business, software, publishing, music, science, which one might say has knocked patent law from its moorings

The medium with the largest increase in ad revenue since 1995 is cable TV, not the internet. Total newspaper ad revenue is 4 times as large as online ad revenue

—Hal Varian, presentation to the FTC: via scribd. The presentation accompanied a piece on googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com that called for more experimentation and offered a Clintonian explanation for part of the problem facing newspapers – it’s the paper, stupid: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”

Is it impossible for serious writers to emerge in our corporatized publishing world, which favors novels-by-number and bite-sized histories that readers can chuck when the plane ride is over? By giving the public what it supposedly wants, has the modern-day publisher jettisoned literature, abandoning a commitment to transcendent works in favor of celebrity memoirs, celebrity novels and celebrity children’s books, most of them ghost-written in the first place? And given the needs of these corporations, whose often-foreign overseers demand high returns-on-investment to pay off loans, has the the editor been superseded by the marketing manager and the publicist, desperate to place an author on “Oprah” or “The Today Show” to ensure a book’s mass success?

—Robert Weil, six years ago, questioning if we are indeed enmeshed in different circumstances than those characterized by the damned mob of scribblers that Hawthorne complained about in the 1850’s: WP.

A new missive from the shifting sands of privacy in the 21st century – Zuckerberg will personally hack your Facebook account, claims valleywag, business insider.

Given how powerful facebook has become, it’s actually remarkable that they proceeded with the expose. Nonetheless, facebook would be wise to avoid an outright confrontation, for they would not want to be tarred as the second tech behemoth to retaliate against unfavorable reporting.

Teachers have a tough job: NYT

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

—Herbert Simon, economist at CMU: via Economist, Designing Organizations for An Information-Rich World (1969, draft)

It’s not a red light, but it’s a flashing yellow light that the strongest part of the rally is probably over. There’s not as much buying power out there.

—Jerome Dodson, president of Parnassus in San Francisco, $3.6b AUM, estimates the S&P 500 will climb 6-9% in 2010: Bloomberg. Bloomberg reported that cash reserves have fallen to 3.6% from 5.6% in January of 2009. It was the fastest decrease since 1991 and an equivalent proportion to September 2007. In both instances, the market rallied slightly, only to fall through the following year. In 1992, it bottomed. In 2008, it was just getting started.

you want to be wary of who’s left to do the buying. With this recovery still relatively fragile, it would not take much to set the market up for a sizable snapback.

—Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery, $1.5b under management: Bloomberg

There’s so much money in the fixed-income market and there’s so much money in money-market instruments paying almost nothing. If that money shifts to stock funds, it’s going to be very bullish.

—Mark Bronzo, Security Global Investors, $21b AUM:Bloomberg

It’s very similar to the early days of long-only investment, when pension funds tended to `buy IBM,’ the household names among money managers. Right now, a number of first-time direct hedge fund investors are buying these name-brand hedge funds, for the perceived safety.

—Donald A. Steinbrugge, managing partner of hedge fund consultant and third-party marketer Agecroft Partners: PI Online

Largest Hedge-Fund Managers
(Ranked by assets as of Dec. 31, 2009)

Firm                        Assets (billions)
JPMorgan Chase              $53.5
Bridgewater Associates      $43.6
Paulson & Co.               $32
Brevan Howard               $27
Soros Fund Management       $27
Man Group                   $25.3
Och-Ziff Capital            $23.1
D.E. Shaw*                  $23
BlackRock/Barclays Global   $21
Farallon Capital            $20.7
Baupost Group**             $20
Goldman Sachs Asset         $17.8
BlueCrest Capital           $17.3
Canyon Partners             $17
Landsdowne Partners*        $15
Renaissance Technologies    $15
Fortress Investment         $13.8
Moore Capital               $12.4
Viking Global*              $12.4
Citadel Investment          $12.2
SAC Capital                 $12
GLG Partners                $11.5
Tudor Investment            $10

Pensions & Investments Magazine, via Bloomberg
*As of Jan. 1, 2010
**As of Sept. 30, 2009
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Google does not reap the benefits of significant network effects because its search algorithms are centered on the analysis of links, and operate essentially the same way whether one person or six billion are using it.

—Randall Stross, professor, UC San Jose: NYT.

[Jon Kyl is] willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent

—Paul Krugman: NYT. Remarking on Kyl’s [R, AZ] conditional support of extending unemployment benefits if Congress eliminate taxes on estates valued more than $7mm. This would affect .25% of estates annually but is clearly a more important constituency to him than those the recession has brought low by unemployment.