CEI Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. ENVIRONMENT
Salt Lake City attempts to keep city employees – including firefighters – from drinking bottled water, citing environmental concerns.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Risk & Environmental Policy Angela Logomasini on folly of the bottled water ban:
Then there’s Salt Lake City. The city government wants workers to leave their bottled water at home. The city even plans to deny firefighters the right to bring bottled water to work — you know, to those raging fires where they risk life and limb. Bottled water offers firefighters a quick, easy way to hydrate during intense and dangerous operations. Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson’s answer to them: Each firefighter will get a refillable container. Two additional personnel will be dispatched to each fire to refill on the scene — which surely will cost taxpayers more than a few bottles of water! And are firefighters really expected to queue up for a drink? What if someone forgets his refillable container?
2. TECHNOLOGY
Universal Music Group prepares to sell songs online without traditional “digital rights management” copyright protection.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews on how tools like DRM can be useful to buyers and sellers of digital content:
Digital rights management (DRM) is a form of self-help that can enforce contractual rights. As a part of the product itself, it addresses the product’s distribution, further redistribution and interoperability. Digital rights management could also be an enabling technology in addition to one that locks up and protects certain content. It can charge a price to the consumer for each play of a song or allow for unrestricted access to a properly paid for work. <?xml:namespace prefix = u1 />DRM has the possibility of being a tailored solution such that it will not be over inclusive and indiscriminately trample on consumer preferences. Ideally, it will enforce consumer rights in addition to the rights of the copyright owner. The law should view a product that utilizes DRM as a contractual agreement between creators and consumers.
3. BUSINESS
Financial markets take a hit over the poor performance of mortgage lenders.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on unrest in the mortgage market:
A well-placed source at one of the country’s biggest financial firms has told me that his firm has decided not to write any jumbo mortgages at all in the immediate future. (Jumbo mortgages are those over $417,000 — the limit at which Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will securitize them.) Nobody, he says, is buying the mortgages to securitize them and the firm prefers not to have them on its own books. If this spread, it will make it very hard for anybody to get these mortgages. The spread between their interest rates and conforming mortgages could become enormous.
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.
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