Say you’re Vladimir Putin, and you did a deal with Trump last year. I’m not suggesting there was any such deal, mind you. But if youare Putin and you did do a deal, what would be Trump’s side of it?
1. Trump repudiates NATO. NATO is the biggest thorn in your side – the alliance that both humiliates you and stymies your ambitions in the Baltics and elsewhere. Trump almost delivered on this last week by pointedly not reaffirming Article 5, which states that an attack on one NATO ally is
an attack on all.
2. Trump antagonizes Europe, especially Angela
Merkel. She’s the strongest leader in the West other than Trump, and you’d love to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Germany. Your larger goal is for Europe to no longer depend on the United States, so you can increase Russia’s influence in Europe. Trump has
almost delivered one on this, too. Now Merkel even says Europe can no longer depend
on America.
3. Trump rejects the
Paris accord on the environment. This will anger America’s other allies
around the world and produce a wave of anti-Americanism – all to your advantage. Nothing would satisfy you more than isolating the United States. Seems like
Trump is about to deliver on this one, too.
4. Trump embarks on a
new era of protectionism. Or at least anti-trade rhetoric. This will threaten the West’s economic interdependence, and loosen America’s economic grip on the rest of the world. Trump is on the way to
delivering on this one.
5. Trump ends the economic sanctions on
Russia imposed after the annexation of Crimea and Russian backing
of separatists in eastern Ukraine. No delivery on this as yet, but you understand
why. Trump has got to deal with all the suspicion in the U.S. over the deal he made with
you to win him the presidency. Once that dies down, he’ll end the
sanctions.
And what was your side of the deal, Vlad? Not only would
you help him win the presidency, but you’d shut up about it so he
wouldn’t be impeached and then convicted of treason.
In other words, if you did do a deal, Trump is still in the process of delivering on his side of it, as are you. That’s the art of the deal.
Lexmark has spent nearly 20 years fighting the war on carbon, trying to stop you from refilling your laser printer cartridges. In 2003, they attempted to use the DMCA and DRM to argue that it was an act of piracy (the courts didn’t buy it) and then in 2015, they went all the way to the Supreme Court with the idea that you were violating their patent license terms if you treated the cartridges you purchased as though you owned them.
Today, the Supreme Court told Lexmark it was wrong. Again. Saying that when a patent holder “chooses to sell an item, that product is no longer within the limits of the monopoly and instead becomes the private individual property of the purchaser, with the rights and benefits that come along with ownership.”
Lexmark was trying to use patents to get something that DRM didn’t get them back in the naughties, but they might well take another run at it. Back then, the company lost in part because the very simple software in its printer cartridges (a 12-byte program!) didn’t rise to the level of a copyrightable work. Today, a cartridge might have tens of thousands of lines of code in it – and thanks to dreadful laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA, all Lexmark would have to do is design their cartridges so that refilling them required breaking some kind of DRM, and they’d be able to threaten their competitors with $500,000 fines and 5 year prison sentences (for a first offense) if they helped you refill your cartridge.
