Entrepreneurship in America

To Nathan Myhvold's name, add Steve Gibson's:

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission...“We perceive there to be millions, if not billions, of infringements out there,” he says.

Maybe this will finally bring the IP situation to a reductio ad absurdum.

A problem with today's USA is that when you think things have come to a reductio ad absurdum, they're just getting underway.

The intention of intellectual-property social contracts is constructive and in principle I endorse the concept, but they are metastasizing to the extent that society arguably would be better off without them altogether. Apparently it is necessary to end progress in science and the useful arts in order to save it.
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Our wise and good Congress at work:

While many companies ask other publishers to take down potentially infringing material, the law doesn't require content owners to do so before filing suit. The federal copyright statute also provides for damages ranging from $750 to $150,000 per infringement.

To repeat, this issue is tailor-made of the Tea Party. Orrin Hatch is a scumbag. I would be delighted to see him dumped like Robert Bennett was.

"For the Children"

When budgets and bureaucratic turf are involved, it can be necessary to endanger children in order to protect them. Instapundit reports (boldface mine):

AND DON’T LET US CATCH YOU BEING NEIGHBORLY AGAIN: State bureaucrats threaten to fine, jail a Michigan woman for watching her neighbors’ kids. If people are neighborly, they need the state less. This cannot be permitted.

Glenn has unwittingly provided every "social-service" bureaucracy with a slogan to be posted prominently in parts of the building where the public is not allowed.

This is how Michigan spends taxpayer money while the state is undergoing an economic cataclysm.

Addendum. After I emailed him, Reynolds added the slogan above to his post.