Brothers in Arms

In Dr. Joyce Brothers's syndicated column yesterday, she replied to a mother whose 13-year-old son admitted to lying. His father wanted to punish him severely by eliminating all after-school activities for two weeks, thus threatening the boy's chance of getting on the basketball team. And what, you ask, was the boy's terrible lie? "My son told me, in private, that he lied to protect his friend, who had stashed a small bit of marijuana behind a locker in a gym. My son happened to be there when a teacher found it, and my son didn't report his friend." The letter is not entirely clear, but apparently the "lie" must have been something like, "I don't know who put that weed there." The mother asked Dr. Brothers if she agreed that the father's punishment was too harsh.

Brothers's reply? "I do agree, because even though your son was wrong, his intentions were honorable. As long as you're certain that your son himself isn't using, I believe some lesser punishment would be more suitable." Well, the good Doctor is headed in the right direction, but I don't think she goes nearly far enough. A better response would have been: "I agree, because your son did nothing wrong. Your husband's reaction is one more symptom of how the crazed drug-war mentality warps and perverts our values. When every citizen, young or old, is conscripted into spying on his neighbors and reporting his friends in order to crack down on a largely harmless drug, I say it's time to reevaluate our priorities. We may have to tolerate the insanity of the Drug Czar and his army of anti-drug zealots, but we don't have to lend him our support. Give your son a pat on the back, praise him for his loyalty to his friend, and congratulate him on his nascent ability to distinguish good rules from stupid ones."

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Suffer the Little Children

This editorial about child labor in less developed countries makes the excellent point, which I might have hoped would be obvious, that the typical alternative to child labor is not hugs and puppies, but prostitution and begging. If you ban or boycott the industries that provide opportunities for better child labor, you just push the children into worse child labor.

But wouldn't I rather these kids be in school? Yeah, and people in hell want ice water, too. School, unfortunately, is typically not an option for the children in question. Never let the best be the enemy of the good.

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X is a Roman Numeral, Right?

Eugene Volokh comments on the discovery of a heretofore unknown quasi-planet that's even smaller and farther out than Pluto. Apparently they intend to name it Quaoar, something out of American (specifically, Southern Californian) Indian mythology. Would it be terribly Eurocentric of me to suggest a name from Roman mythology for the sake of pure consistency? It just doesn't seem right to have nine planets (or quasi-planets if Pluto's demotion is a fait accompli) from the Romans and one from something totally different. I was thinking Faunus (Roman equivalent of the Greek Pan) would be appropriate, given the entity's quasi-planet quasi-asteroid status.

Then again, we have four days of the week named after Norse gods and only one (Saturday) named after a Roman god, as well as two not named after gods at all, so perhaps they're aiming at consistency of inconsistency.

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Effective Gun Control: A Cock and John Bull Story?

Opponents of gun rights have for years claimed Great Britain as the paragon of effective gun control. An article by Joyce Lee Malcolm in the November 2002 issue of Reason Magazine (unfortunately not available at ReasonOnline) casts serious doubt on that claim. Although the rates of murder and rape are still much higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, it turns out that Britain now has substantially higher violent crime rates in every other category, from assault to armed robbery to burglary. Moreover, the rise in violent crime across the pond has followed the passage of ever stricter gun control laws, most notably the outright ban of all handguns in 1997. The article observes that "[y]our chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York" (p. 22).

This is journalism, of course, not social science. It would take a more careful study (like John Lott's work on concealed carry laws in the U.S.) to convince me that gun control laws are really to blame for Britain's rise in crime. But a couple of factoids in the article jumped out at me. First, for those who would focus on the murder rate and ignore the rest, it's worth noting that Britain has always had a relatively low murder rate, even in the days before either country implemented gun control laws: "A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million" (p. 22). (I would be curious to know the homicide rate with all forms of gun.)

Second -- and this is the point that really piqued my interest -- the murder rate is calculated differently in Britain. "The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isn't subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police 'massage down' the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible" (p. 25). Even so, the two countries' murder rates have been converging. In 1981, ours was 8.7 times as high; in 1995, 5.7 times as high; and in the most recent study (no year stated), 3.5 times as high (p. 25).

As a responsible academic, I should point out that none of this constitutes definitive proof that gun control causes more crime. Further research is required to separate out the effects of (for instance) business cycles, different policing strategies, severity of criminal punishments, etc. Rather, it means that gun controllers can no longer (fairly) make the opposite claim that gun control reduces crime. Their most famous exemplar isn't so exemplary after all.

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Makin' More Copies

Julian suggests a possible exception to my argument below about retroactive copyright extensions, and I think he's probably right, though I have doubts about the empirical significance of the special case he describes. Essentially, the creative works in question would need to have three characteristics: (a) they are improvements on existing works, and the improvements have a relatively high cost for the first production; (b) the resulting improved work has a relatively low (zero or nearly zero) cost of reproduction thereafter; and (c) the improved work is not copyrightable in its own right.

There a couple of reasons I doubt the empirical significance of cases like this. First, there are various ways in which condition (c) can be avoided. For instance, if you convert an old document into an html document without any other modification, that's probably not copyrightable -- but if you include your own original annotations, I believe it is copyrightable (again, assuming I'm not mistaken about the operation of copyright law). Similarly, cartographers distinguish their own maps from others' for copyright purposes by adding fictional towns and other unique features to their maps. Second, I have a hard time thinking of good examples that satisfy condition (a) without violating condition (c). It's interesting that Julian gives the example of converting old works into html form and posting them on the web, because Eldred (the petitioner in this case) is a guy who had been doing that very thing with works like The Scarlet Letter without remuneration, and the 1998 copyright extension prevented him from doing the same with more recent works. Point being, the initial costs are often low enough in cases like this that some people are apparently willing to incur them for free, which reduces the significance of the problem (if any). It strikes me that this is probably the same phenomenon that Julian (in a previous blog post that I can't seem to locate) identifies as the reason open-source programming can overcome the incentive problem: as the number of interested parties grows, the likelihood of having at least one person willing to provide a relatively low-cost service purely for reputational gain approaches one.

Nonetheless, I concede that there is a theoretical possibility of cases that meet all three criteria. Perhaps that's why constitutional scholars seem to be placing more emphasis on the freedom of speech challenge. If there is some chance that the law serves some economic function other than enriching the holders of copyrights about to expire, the Supreme Court might be willing to defer to the legislature on the interpretation of the Constitution's intellectual property clause. But a freedom of speech challenge means that the government must satisfy a standard higher than existence of a theoretical possibility in order to justify the restriction on expressive activity. At the very least, the retroactive extensions would seem to fail to meet the "narrowly tailored" requirement: they grant extended monopoly protection to all works whose copyright hasn't yet expired, regardless of whether they fit in the special case Julian has described.

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