The Inner Enemies of Democracy

The Inner Enemies of Democracy. By Tzvetan Todorov, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), pp.vi + 201. £20.00 (cloth).     

The World Bank's land of kiosks: Community driven development in Timor-Leste

The World Bank's Community Empowerment and Local Governance Project (CEP) was the key donor programme to assist with community reconstruction in a newly independent Timor-Leste. Commencing in 2000, the US$18 million project provided funds to over 400 local development councils that had been newly created to meet their community's development needs. Rather than creating genuine participatory structures, tight deadlines to disburse project funds and bureaucratic project rules reduced the councils to little more than transmission lines to Bank-controlled dollars. By bypassing existing governance structures, including that of the fledging government, the councils also bypassed sources of local legitimacy and technical knowledge, which resulted in community conflict, indifference, and poor project sustainability. The CEP's poorly administered microcredit scheme led to a proliferation of unviable kiosks—underlining the folly of hastily attempting to construct a market economy on a deeply scarred subsistence economy.     

The case against the use of polygraph examinations to monitor post‐conviction sex offenders

In this article I caution against the use of polygraph testing in convicted sex‐offenders programs. First, I explain that the prevalent method of polygraph testing, the CQT, suffers from several major flaws and has no scientific basis. These flaws, which characterize all usages of the CQT, including its use with sex offenders, create a considerable risk for false positive as well as false‐negative errors. Second, no methodologically sound research examining the validity of the CQT, neither in its forensic application, nor in its use with sex offenders has been conducted. Finally, I explain why the use of CQT polygraphy with sex offenders is even more problematic than its common use as an aid in criminal investigations. Clearly, rehabilitation programs of convicted sex offenders are highly important, but the use of polygraph testing in this context is misguided and instead of reducing recidivism in sex offenders is likely to achieve just the opposite.     

Fair use and copyright protection: a price theory explanation

Copyright scholars suggest that computer technology has reduced transaction costs associated with copyright transfer, allegedly eliminating the need for the fair-use doctrines that were developed to allow limited use of copyrighted material in situations where the transaction costs of securing authorized use would be prohibitive. According to this emerging view, in an ideal world with no contracting costs, third party use of copyrighted material could realistically only take place with the express consent of the copyright holder. This would give the author absolute power to dispose of his work, including the right to veto uses, without the possibility of a fair use “override” of any sort.This paper shows the limits of such transaction cost-based arguments. If transaction costs provide the dominant economic justification of “fair-use” doctrines, an exogenous reduction of such transaction costs would limit the scope and application of the defense of fair use. Nevertheless, in this paper we suggest that, when viewed in light of the anticommons theory, fair-use doctrines retain a valid efficiency justification even in a zero transaction-cost environment. Fair-use defenses are justifiable, and in fact instrumental, in minimizing the welfare losses prompted by the strategic behavior of the copyright holders. Even if copyright licenses can be transferred at no cost (for instance, in a “click and pay” frictionless computer world), the strategic behavior of the copyright holders would still create possible deadweight losses.In this context, we identify a number of critical variables that should guide and constrain the application of fair-use doctrines. These variables include (a) the number of copyright holders; (b) the degree of complementarity between the copyrighted inputs; (c) the degree of independence between the various copyright holders in the pricing of their licenses; and (d) ability to price discriminate.