Amazon's DRM-free store is #2 online music seller

Only six months after opening, Amazon's MP3 service has become the second-largest online music retailer. To differentiate themselves from iTunes Music Store, they only sell DRM-free music which comes in MP3 form that you can easily share with anyone you'd like. While Apple is moving in that direction, as of yet only about a third of their catalog is DRM-free, and Amazon has more than twice the amount of DRM-free songs available.

Licensing as cartels

From Radley Balko at Fox News (yeah, I know), the most succinct article I've ever seen on the anti-competitive practice of professional licensing. The artificial scarcity of taxi cabs in large cities is pretty well known, but Balko shows that this practice is creeping into other professions: interior designers in many states, florists in Louisiana, basic equine dentistry in Texas, and hair dressers and beauty salons in many states. And on top of all that, the article points out that the exams necessary for earning a license are evaluated by already-licensed professionals, who obviously have an incentive to lessen their competition. This paper from the Reason Foundation gives a detailed look at licensing laws across the US, along with some absurd anecdotes about the hoops that people have to jump through to do what they already know how to do.

Licensing becomes particularly Kafka-esque when it comes to African hair braiding: a very time-consuming and expensive way of styling hair. Drive down any commercially-zoned street (and some that aren't) in any city with a large black population and you'll see that these salons are integrals parts of these economies. And yet, according to the Institute for Justice, the process for becoming licensed can be very time-consuming and difficult:

In all but a handful of states, performing African hairbraiding professionally without a government-issued license is against the law. And earning the license requires braiders to take more than 1,000 hours of coursework that cover techniques completely unrelated and even antithetical to the type of natural hair care braiders provide.

The State of Washington’s regulations are typical of many states, requiring even skilled braiders to take up to 1,600 hours of completely unrelated classes to get a cosmetology or barbering license to braid legally. In Mississippi, braiders can get a cosmetology license with a 1,500-hour class, or a “wigology” license with 300 hours of classes in wig care, but only two of the state’s more than 40 cosmetology schools offer wigology. That leaves most aspiring braiders in the state with only three options: attend an expensive, 1,500-hour cosmetology program that doesn’t teach braiding, abandon their profession or operate outside the law.

Recognizing this problem, Melony Armstrong, who earned her wigology license, decided to open a wigology school to teach her craft to others. But the State doesn’t allow wigology-only schools. Instead, Melony must open a cosmetology school—even if she only wants to teach braiding and wigology—which means spending more than 3,000 hours (about three academic years) in cosmetology and cosmetology instructor programs. Of course, those programs don’t teach braiding.

Consider that in the 3,200 classroom hours it would take for Armstrong to get a license to teach hairbraiding, she could instead become licensed in all of the following professions: emergency medical technician (122 hours plus five emergency runs), paramedic (1,700 hours), ambulance driver (8 hours), law enforcement officer (ten weeks), firefighter (six weeks), real estate appraiser (75 hours) and hunting education instructor (20 hours). And all of that would take more than 600 hours less than getting her license to teach braiding.

Great Psychological Firewall of China

From The Atlantic, an interesting article on the "Great Firewall of China," which the author finds out isn't all that impenetrable. The real security comes in the uncertainty of knowing whether or not you are trying to access banned information. The reasoning goes that Chinese internet users will go for the easy information – self-censored, uncontroversial news – and won't take the extra step (which is relatively easy) of using a proxy to access censored information. Though, as the article notes, China definitely isn't at totalitarian regime, this ambiguous sort of censorship encourages a police state mentality where your paranoia is a bigger check on your activity than actual repression.

Peer pressure

Since I don't know anyone who's ever been peer pressured into taking drugs, maybe DARE ought to target foreign ministries.

Five years, how many bodies?

I must admit that I didn't look very hard, but I didn't see any pieces in American media this week about the Iraqi death toll from the war in Iraq. The Guardian, however, has an excellent piece discussing the disparate estimates of the death toll. The counts range from the extremely conservative Iraq Body Count number of between 80,000 and 90,000, to as high as about a million and a half. The article delves into the epistemological and methodological nitty-gritty of the surveys, which is the type of critical science reporting that you don't see often enough in the American media. From the last two paragraphs of the article, a jarring conclusion:

Alas for Bush and Blair, most statisticians do not support their case. Nor can any journalist or other independent witness who has seen the pain of the bereaved still living in post-invasion Iraq or the millions who have escaped to Jordan and Syria. Estimates of the Iraqi deaths caused by Saddam's regime amount to a maximum of one million over a 35-year period (100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign in the 1980s; 400,000 in the war against Iran; 100,000 Shias in the suppressed uprising of 1991; and an unknown number executed in his prisons and torture chambers). Averaged over his time in power, the annual rate does not exceed 29,000.

Only the conservatively calculated Iraq Body Count death toll credits the occupation with an average annual rate that is less than that - some 18,000 deaths in the five years so far. Every other source, from the WHO to the surveys of Iraqi households, puts the average well above the Saddam-era figure. Those who claim Saddam's toppling made life safer for Iraqis have a lot of explaining to do.

Sex for green cards

Everyone knows about cops' not-so-infrequent sexual interactions with prostitutes, but here's one I've never heard from the NYT: "An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex." Unsurprisingly, according to the article, this isn't anything new.

Iraq irony

These past few days have been major anniversaries for two days in Iraqi history. The one everyone noticed was the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The one everybody forgot was Saddam Hussein's gassing of the rebel Kurdish city of Halabja. Twenty years ago Sunday, on 16 March 1988, as part of Chemical Ali's Anfal Campaign, 5000 Kurds died on the spot, and 7000 were injured or have chronic illnesses.

But why is this relevant? Because the United States at the time knowingly defended and protected Saddam Hussein in the court of international opinion, according to an article in the Nation published a few months ago. And the operatives in this disinformation campaign were disturbingly familiar: Colin Powell (Reagan's National Security Adviser) and Donald Rumsfeld ("Special Middle East Envoy"). Rumsfeld especially conveyed many messages to Baghdad, signaling the US's willingness to overlook and cover up Saddam's gas attacks. Nary a month after 9/11, and Bush was already talking about the gassing of the Kurds as implicating Saddam Hussein. Of course, you know the rest.

Open spectrum

In light of the recent end of the FCC's latest spectrum auction, I think it's a good idea to examine the idea of spectrum licensing and the FCC. Currently, the FCC divides up the spectrum between technologies and companies, using its technocratic expertise as a guide. Some of it is unlicensed – like baby monitors and Wi-Fi – but appliances using it must still adhere to certain specifications, intended to eliminate interference. But is this even necessary? Some people think not. Open spectrum backers (including techno-libertarian Larry Lessig) argue that "interference" is all relative, and is not an issue (or would not be an issue with the proper competitive pressures) with technology that can separate the data from the noise. They argue not just for an increase in unlicensed spectrum – which is still subject to government interference – but a complete liberalization of the airwaves.

It might strike some as communistic, since we generally think of the airwaves as a good, and naturally market liberals would want these to be in private hands. However, they are not any old good – they're infinitely divisible, utterly non-excludable, and pretty damn indefensible – unless you have the power of the state. Without a government, it's hard to imagine any sort of collective agreement being made – more likely is that each firm would work individually to project and protect their data stream. In my mind, it's a similar situation to that of intellectual property – we've attached this label of "property" to these things and have neglected the important differences between these goods and traditional physical goods.

And when you think about all the airwaves as fundamentally planned by government, it raises questions as to how truly "natural" our information and entertainment habits really are.

Today in history

From Wired, today in history, 1474: Venice passes the first-known written law to grant and protect patents. England followed in 1623. The Constitution gave the US Congress authority to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," and it used that power in 1790 to pass the Patents Act. Then France, then next thing you know, states are conspiring to enforce, spread, and harmonize patent law.

Anarchy in Somalia on Wikipedia

Last semester I wrote a paper about anarchy in Somalia, and I remember reading the Anarchy in Somalia article – there were a few citations, but it wasn't really that helpful. But I went back today, and it really has gotten a lot better. There are a lot more quotes, and some more indications of what's going on today. So, hats off to you, (not so) anonymous Wikipedians!