I don't usually link to DKos diaries, but I'll make an exception for this one on how the Copyright Royalty Board is strangling internet radio by continually increasing the royalties they have to pay in order to play songs - when FM radio can play the exact same songs and pay... nothing. The amount they are increasing is so much that it will make most internet radio stations unviable within a few years. This is a prime example of how IP laws, taken too far, strangle downstream economic growth. Intellectual property benefits a society most when it can be used by others to create business as well - not just the record company that controls the pipes (and do be clear, that for the vast majority of musicians, most of their earnings come not from recordings, but from live performances. While some of the very largest artists are effected by IP laws, for the most part it's not an accident that the majors are the people freaking out, not the artists.) If you think this is something you'd like to do something about, the diary has some actions you can take. Click on over.

David Sirota writes about a PBS interview with Charles Bobrinskoy, who works for the investment that owns the LA Times. Bobrinskoy feels that the LA Times needs less coverage of politics and foreign affairs and more of the entertainment industry. Or, in his words, "[The LA Times] has got these 22 foreign bureaus...That's not what readers want. Readers care about the local entertainment industry...They care about things like fashion...Where the problem is, is that the people who are writing the L.A. Times, they want to be writing about international events. They want to be writing long-term pieces about why Bush went to war in Iraq. And we're saying, and the people at Tribune are saying, there are other people writing those stories...Do we really need the L.A. Times devoting the resources it has to that story?" Meanwhile, AP didn't cover Paris Hilton for a week, and no one cared... Maybe entertainment news is not all that people want? Maybe it's that entertainment news is cheap to cover and real reporting costs more?

The Nashua telegraph writes about the new Bush nominee for the Consumer Product Safety Comission, Michael Baroody, an executive vice president of the manufacturers association, an association which has sought to convince the Safety Comission to relax standards. I'm guessint that soon enough they'll be doing just what Baroody wants. And, of course, he'll be appointed in recess. I'm beginning to think that the ability to do recess appointments needs to be removed entirely, Bush has abused it so badly.

Seems that the march of censorship and the assumption that citizens are best off if they are kept happy and ignorant continues its sweep across the world. Today's stop... France, where the government has banned anyone except professional journalists from broadcasting (that includes the internet) acts of violence. Sarkozy, France's ambitious right-wing Minister of the Interior, is behind this ruling. As MacWorld points out, this criminalizes such things as, say, filming and transmitting police brutality, or riots, or anything else along those lines. Since France's professional journalists have long been rather good at understanding what they should, and shouldn't broadcast, the end effect of this law may be to sweep the cloak of rumor and secrecy over a lot of violence in Paris's suburbs.

AT&T whistle-blower Mark Klein (the guy who revealed that the NSA was installing equipment at AT&T to allow domestic surveillance in the US) talks about how the LA Times (hey, them again) killed the story of what was going on at, according to him, the request of Negroponte and then NSA director Hayden. Fortunately the NY Times was willing to release the story. A lot of US reporters and especially editors and publishers, seem to have forgotten what their job is. It's not clear to me if this is just the sort of deference to authority which should be antithetical to good journalists; or if its based on the hysterical fear of terrorism which seized much of the journalist corps and led them to aid and abet Bush's propaganda push for the Iraq war, but in either case it's a sickness. Democracy and rule of law dies in secrecy, not in the light. But I'm sure Bobrinskoy thinks it was the right decision - I mean people don't care if they're being spied on... they just want to know what Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears are up to.