Last night, I watched a little bit of the MSNBC coverage of the then upcoming State of the Union address. And what I saw so upset me that I didn’t even watch the event. It was big news yesterday that Iran had captured ten US Navy crew members. So it was time to start demagoguing! And there was Steve Schmidt on “liberal” MSNBC going on (and on and on) about how the president needed to change his speech and talk tough about Iran and under no circumstance should the president tout the Iranian nuclear deal because Iran is bad, bad, bad.

Chris Matthews fired back. He’s not an artful guy, but what he said was basically correct: the Republicans just look for anything to complain about the president, that it was a bad faith criticism, and that Schmidt himself was doing that. Schmidt defended himself by noting that his wife was in the Navy and through a kind of “some of my best friends are military,” claimed that he didn’t just want war.

As I recall, both Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes made the argument that the whole thing was a diplomatic issue and maybe the president would be wrong to politicize it and might put these very service members in jeopardy. All I could think at the time was that this was going to be how it was. It didn’t matter that the president wanted to use the SotU address to call for collaboration, it was all going to be about conservative jerks like Steve Schmidt going around claiming that Obama is weak because he doesn’t rip off his shirt and pound his chest.

At the actual SotU address, Obama went on with his speech as planned. He told the assembled conservative whiners that we had a solid economy, and, “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.” And then after the speech, the press was filled with headlines like this one in The Washington Post, Iran Releases Captured US Navy Crew Members. And there was this in The New York Times, Iran’s Swift Release of US Sailors Hailed as a Sign of Warmer Relations. Oh! So contrary to Steven Schmidt, it’s actually things like the Iran nuclear deal and the fact that Obama believes in diplomacy that made this whole thing a non-issue, except for the conservative ranters who are only interested in finding fault with the president because he happens to be a Democrat.

Now you might say that this is much ado about nothing. And that’s true in an absolute sense. It’s just that it is always true. What Steve Schmidt was really saying was that he doesn’t like the Iran nuclear deal, and he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t like the president, and he doesn’t like the president because he’s a conservative hack. Of course, what seems to have been lost in all of this is that it was actually America that was at fault. What Iran did is what we would have done in that circumstance. But any excuse for more whining from conservatives.

What exactly Steve Schmidt is doing on television is unclear to me. If he had been more successful, we would have President McCain, be at war with Iran right now, and have Sarah Palin embarrassing us all over the world. Someone on Twitter last night said that he should be on Fox News, but I countered that. Say what you will about Fox News, at least the people on it are interesting. Steve Schmidt is on MSNBC because the network is desperate to have some kind of conservative who can breath through his nose to sort of counter Rachel Maddow. I hope Schmidt realizes just how much he benefits from affirmative action.

As I was getting ready to leave town Monday morning, I saw that Chris Hughes had decided to sell New Republic. It’s interesting to me because I was harsh in my criticism of the late 2014 resignation debacle. I first wrote, New Republic: 1914 – 2014. And then later, Attack of the Crybaby: Why Chris Hughes Turned Against New Republic. It is this latter one that I find myself thinking about now. What exactly was Chris Hughes thinking all this time.

I don’t think that what happened is opened to debate. Hughes started by thinking it would be fun to own a magazine. He had a great time hanging out with really accomplished, sophisticated people who had earned their reputations at the top of the liberal publishing pyramid. It must have been heady for Hughes, because let’s not forget: all Hughes did was happen to be Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate. That’s it. There’s no doubt that he’s smart enough, but he isn’t even at Zuckerberg’s level, and that level is low itself.

But after hanging out with the cool kids for a couple of years, Hughes got bored with it. After all, people like Jeet Heer were little more than celebrities to Hughes. And the truth is to them, Hughes was probably just a rich kid who owed his position to luck. They appreciated the money, but that was as far as it went. So given that New Republic was no longer fun, Hughes had to come up with a reason to have bought it — something to save face. So he came up with the idea he would revolutionize publishing.

The problem was that Hughes couldn’t revolutionize anything — the best he could hope for is to be the roommate of someone who might revolutionize publishing. And that wasn’t going to happen. But even if he had been a genius, he didn’t understand the publishing industry. So he was destined to fail regardless. And so that led to his letter Monday where he announced that he was selling New Republic because of the question he can’t answer, “Can it find a sustainable business model that will power its journalism in the decades to come?”

Well, it’s going to be pretty hard to sell New Republic as anything but a brand name that someone might want to take on. Thirteen months ago, it employed a great staff of writers and editors. Now they are mostly distributed throughout the publishing industry. Now I pretty much only follow Brian Beutler and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Stoker. I don’t see who is going to be all that interested in buying Chris Hughes’ plaything now that he’s broken it.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo made a great point about the constraints of running a news organization within a budget. That was something that Hughes had no interest in. The idea of managing New Republic better doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him. Instead, he blew $20 million in four years. His idea seems to have been that he could use the power of the internet to turn the magazine into something really special. But of course, there are already millions of people on the internet trying to do that.

A lot of people are talking about the old New Republic business model: modest financial losses made up for with donations from rich donors. Certainly that is what I thought Chris Hughes was going to do when he first bought the magazine. But he’s turned out to be far more immature than that. He never had a plan. He never tried to make the magazine efficient. He just tried to have fun. And when he was done, he tried to say face.

His legacy will be that he destroyed the magazine. There really is no point in it continuing on. But of course, it will continue on — just like Netscape continues on. But what it shows is that it is dangerous to have really rich people around. Hughes is like Bill and Melinda Gates. They are all people who think that because they are wealthy, they must be smart and able to fix difficult problems. And because they can throw around a lot of money, there are always lots of people around to tell them they are right. But now that Hughes isn’t having fun and everyone is laughing at him for being incompetent, he’s giving up and going out looking for something else to have fun with. After the Gates Foundation manages to finish all its education “reforms” only to find that they’ve made things worse, the Gates will find something else that they don’t understand to help “fix.”

No one should care that New Republic is dying. But we should care very much that our excessive income inequality allows rich fools to destroy venerable institutions because they think their money makes them smart.

A lot of my day job involves work about copyright. That is why you will notice that I am now so careful about using only free and fair use images and giving credit. It’s made me paranoid. But also, I really didn’t know much in the past. I thought, for example, I could take anything from Wikipedia and it was okay. It turns out, that’s not true. All images on the site are free, but most of them require attribution. I’ve just taken to providing attribution regardless, because I like giving people credit. I’m grateful that I can use their work to provide a better experience for my readers.

But last night, I was thinking about the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, which was created by Shepard Fairey. It’s a beautiful design. And after thousands of parodies, beyond the visual idea, it is clearly hard to render well. But back in 2009, I was listening to Fresh Air, and Mannie Garcia was being interviewed. He was a photographer for the Associated Press, and it turned out that Fairey had used one of Garcia’s photos as the basis of the “Hope” poster. It was because there was a legal battle going on: how dare Fairey “steal” Garcia’s work!

As a legal matter, I think what Fairey did was entirely in keeping with the letter and spirit of fair use. Garcia had taken thousands of photos. He didn’t recognize that Fairey had used his image because Fairey hadn’t. Fairey used a small part of one of his images and made something totally new. But Fairey knew the slippery legal foundation of all this because he tried to hide the source of his poster. That was stupid, but probably standard operating procedure, because the way the law works, if everyone had a good enough lawyer, nothing would ever be created.

The way it worked out, Fairey and the AP made a settlement where they would share the royalties going forward. I believe Garcia was squeezed out of the deal all together. Think about that. Fairey takes a small part of an endless supply of photographs that the AP publishes, each of which has negligible marginal value. He turns it into something that is not only of great cultural important but also of great financial value. And he has to share the profits from that. This is rent seeking, pure and simple. This isn’t about art. The AP hired Garcia because they wanted photos to go with an event that was being covered. This is just a big business forcing an innovative small business to pay it money. It is a kind of protection racket for big corporations.

But what bugged me in the interview was that Garcia was offended at the idea Fairey would just go online and look for images — that he did not “condone people taking things, just because they can, off the Internet.” The nature of all art is acquisition. But in the visual arts, it’s totally out of hand. No one would ever be sued for using the phrase, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Yet that is exactly what happened in the case of the “Hope” poster. In fact, it was even worse, because that particular element of that particular photo is not nearly as memorable — and creative — as Chomsky’s sentence.

The original purpose of copyright was to encourage the creative arts. It has been a long time since that’s been true. Now copyright discourages the creative arts. All copyright really encourages is the promotion of things that look salable and legal action against creative workers. It’s sad. And it means that creativity has been corporatized. It’s just another sign of an empire in decline.

Afterword: Copyright and Fair Use

It’s amusing that Fairey couldn’t use part of the original image to make his iconic poster. But Wikipedia can now use his poster — a far greater creative achievement — under fair use.