It Was a Tulip Craze

This article from Wired Magazine (somewhat similar to this article from the N.Y. Times a month ago) seems to me to confirm that the present financial meltdown was caused by a sort of modern tulip mania, this time for collateralized debt obligations. A taste:

What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation’s macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well?

Enter [David X.] Li…. Using some relatively simple math—by Wall Street standards, anyway—Li came up with an ingenious way to model default correlation without even looking at historical default data. Instead, he used market data about the prices of instruments known as credit default swaps. . . . It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. . . .

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Litman on the Prospect of Copyright Reform

Jessica Litman, the John F. Nickoll Professor of Law and Professor of Information at the
University of Michigan, delivered the Twelfth Annual Honorable Helen Wilson Nies Memorial Lecture yesterday at the Law School. (Audio available here; a print version will be forthcoming in the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review.) The subject of Litman’s fascinating lecture was “Real Copyright Reform” — the word “real” referring not to what is likely to actually occur, but rather what sort of changes would truly reform the Copyright Act.

Litman believes that yet another wholesale revision of the Copyright Act, akin to those in 1831, 1870, 1909, and 1976, is in the offing. The warning signs are all there — practitioners are arguing that different meanings should be given to the same terms in different contexts, industry players are opting out of the Act’s provisions in private agreements, and the current Act no longer serves any of its constituencies very well. Those constituencies include not only creators and distributors, the primary movers behind previous reform efforts, but now also device makers and, increasingly, ordinary users of copyrighted works, who in the past were treated by copyright law with benign neglect. Now, as evidenced by the RIAA lawsuits and YouTube notice and takedowns, consumers are no longer below the fray; they are getting drawn into the battles between distributors and device makers.

What can legal scholars offer the copyright revision process? Litman was not optimistic that the legislative process would produce a worthy reform, or that scholars would get to play much of a role in it, but she offered three goals the ideal “Copyright Act of 2026” should meet.

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Can You Bug Your Own Cellphone?

This recent post over at Consumerist caught my eye: A person loses his cell phone. Before he lost it, he set it up to blind-copy him on all emails sent from the cell phone. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that he did this (as the post recommends) as a “pretty brilliant low-tech security solution for tracking down a lost/stolen phone or laptop.” Pretty soon, someone finds the cellphone and begins using it, evidently with no attempt to locate the owner. The readers of Consumerist are collectively able to track the finder down within 55 minutes and get him to promise to return the phone, which he actually did.

Naturally, I had the same reaction to this story that anyone else would: Is that a violation of the Wiretap Act?

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