It’s January 1 here in Japan. May we all have a happy new year.
As usual, my final newspaper column of last year looked back, and was headlined “2002 was a rough year for liberty and trust”.
My first column this year is the annual predictions quiz. Hope I get more right this year than last…
I’ll be posting infrequently during the next few days. Hope your holiday season is a happy one…
Los Angeles Times: Showtime for theater owners. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said that although the population is larger today, this year’s surge is “stunning” because of the choices technology now provides, including VCRs, cable television, satellite dishes and the Internet.
That won’t stop Valenti and his fellow members of the entertainment cartel from trying to derail all new technologies they don’t like. This is a man who should read history.Valenti led the charge to kill the VCR, which was going to kill Hollywood. Oops, didn’t happen. In fact, the VCR probably saved the studios.
What’s really stunning is the way the nation continues to kow-tow to these bandits, who steal from the public domain and now want to steal from our future.
Chris Gulker has an interesting take on a mindless quote he saw about bloggers. Needless to say I have many thoughts on this, too, but not enough time right now to put them online. Watch this space, but be sure to read Chris’ comments in the meantime.
Guardian (London): US wrecks cheap drugs deal. Talks at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters collapsed last night after the White House ruled out a deal which would have permitted a full range of life-saving drugs to be imported into Africa, Asia and Latin America at cut-price costs.
Well, we wouldn’t want to do anything to disturb George Bush’s corporate sponsors, would we?
I’m not sure Al Gore would have done any better on this. Maybe he could have been shamed into doing the right thing. The crowd in power right now doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
Look for a key ruling today in Sun Microsystems’ antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, a Sun PR person has told reporters in an e-mail. Sun wants an injunction requiring Microsoft to bundle current Java code with Windows. If the judge grants this, he’ll be signaling his belief that Sun will win the case at trial.
If your car maker forced you to use the dealership for all service and repairs, and backed that up with electronic locks you couldn’t legally break, you’d be furious. Yet the entertainment and software industries are doing just that kind of thing today.
You may have bought it, but you have very limited rights. A court case in Hong Kong is all about this growing problem.
More in my Sunday column.
The Head Lemur observes that if you put stuff on the Web and then get mad when people find it, you’re an idiot.
New York Times: Wall St. Firms to Pay $1.4 Billion in Settlement With Regulators. The agreement is a result of roughly five months of fractious negotiations between the firms and securities regulators. It is intended to force Wall Street to produce honest stock research and to protect analysts from pressure within the firm to issue upbeat forecasts to attract investment banking fees. Under the terms of the deal, brokerage firms will also be barred from dispensing hot stocks to top executives or directors of public companies.
So this is how it ends. The firms that made billions are fined a relatively small percentage of their ill-gotten gains. And the people who did the dirty work get away with it.Does anyone really think Wall Street won’t find a way around these new rules in short order? Watch. They’re creative people in the financial markets. They can evade any rule in search of profits. And they will.
Wanting punishment is not about revenge. It’s to show that there’s an actual risk in cheating investors. The lesson from this settlement shows who takes the risk.
As usual, the ones who take the risks are the shareholders. The insiders got theirs, and it looks like they’ll get to keep their loot. What a system.
