IN COPPERWELD CORP. ET AL. v. INDEPENDENCE TUBE CORP., there were allegations of an anti-competitive conspiracy -- but the only conspirators the plaintiff demonstrated were a corporate parent and its wholly owned subsidiary. The conspiracy was thus entirely within one corporation, and not a conspiracy at all. The Supreme Court held that under federal antitrust law a corporate parent could not be deemed to be "conspiring" with its wholly-owned subsidiary. While there was some controversy over how far the majority pushed this obvious doctrine to the facts at hand, even the dissent (and therefore the entire court unanimously) agreed that

It is safe to assume that corporate affiliates do not vigorously compete with one another. A price-fixing or market-allocation agreement between two or more such corporate entities does not, therefore, eliminate any competition that would otherwise exist. It makes no difference whether such an agreement is labeled a "contract," a "conspiracy," or merely a policy decision, because it surely does not unreasonably restrain competition within the meaning of the Sherman Act.

Now, the California Senate is considering a bill that would repeal the Copperweld doctrine for purposes of California law.

Why? The obvious one-word answer: Enron.

Apparently, California is still having trouble finding something illegal about the profits made by companies that benefited from California's self-imposed regulatory debacle. So, it hopes to rewrite the law to retroactively permit recovery from energy companies, who, because of existing regulatory concerns, are almost always subdivided into subsidiaries trading amongst one another. There may not have been a conspiracy between different energy companies to manipulate prices, but there almost sure as heck were (harmless) intra-company agreements regarding such trading. If this bill passes, a lawyer will be able to point to the huge one-time profits, point to a few memos within the corporate entity, and the hometown jury will happily transfer wealth; the defendant can only sputter, because it won't be allowed to point out that the correct response is "So what?"

But it's not just a one-time retransfer of wealth from Texas to California, which may or may not be grossly unfair depending on whether there really was an industry-wide conspiracy to manipulate energy prices. The real concern is that there's no telling what the unintended consequences of this bill, if it passes, will be to other industries doing business in the state who may find themselves, by a quirk of corporate structure, to be suddenly subject to expropriatory lawsuits.

Because the repeal of the Copperweld doctrine is attached to a bill allowing a monopolization action in California, the whole kit and kaboodle may pass; the California Attorney General is lobbying heavily for it. It's already out of one committee and read twice.

There's been absolutely no media coverage of this.

WELL, MAYBE Israeli soldiers can receive pizza. This story is awfully recent and implies only that additional security measures are needed. So does the original web site. Caveat emptor.

I'M SOMEHOW RANKED seventeenth, give or take, in the "sexiest male blogger" poll. Lord knows who's voting for me: they're not sending me fan-mail. But the Pejmans and Vodkapundits are campaigning, and perhaps even performing CAIR-like machinations, so I recommend that you protest this rank objectification of blogosians by exercising your God-given right to stuff the ballot box. So to speak. I could always use the publicity.

A lengthy recitation of major inconsistencies and plot-holes in the Star Wars series.

CATHY SEIPP runs into Oliver Stone at a party, with hilarious consequences.

IF I CAN'T BE Eugene Volokh or Glenn Reynolds when I grow up, Howard Bashman would be a pretty nifty alternative career path. And he's got an equally nifty blog, plus shares my fandom of Judges Easterbrook and Posner.

The Seventh Circuit in Chicago, where these two judges sit, has an exemplary web site. For example, if you want to follow Mr. Bashman's commentary about a recent contracts case, not only can you read the court's opinion, but also look up the briefs of the parties and listen to the oral argument.

AWFUL PUN OF THE DAY. But no doubt thought of by thousands of other lawyers: Are the attorneys representing the respondents in Eldred v. Ashcroft acting pro Bono?

PART OF THE APPEAL OF TIVO and perhaps other personal video recorders (PVRs in industry jargon, though the Times calls them digital video recorders) is that they can hypothetically use a model similar to the Amazon model to fill up a hard drive with forty hours of programming that consists partly of stuff you know you want to watch, but also stuff you might want to watch if you had preferences similar to others who watch the shows you like to watch. Given the option of this or of 200 channels that happen to be broadcasting this second, you're more likely to find preferable programming on the PVR -- some of the 200 channels might be in the middle of a movie or program, and there will be dozens of specialized channels that a particular viewer is almost never going to want to watch. The eventual culmination of this, if bandwidth and IP and pricing issues can be resolved, will be video-on-demand ("VOD") -- an advanced (and hopefully cheaper) version of what's in hotel rooms across the country now, except with thousands of choices instead of the few dozen in hotels or the twenty to sixty hours of choices on a PVR.

Maybe this is old news to other people, but: when it comes to music videos, VOD is already here. Launch.com, now an arm of Yahoo, will call up just about any music video (including some fairly obscure ones) on demand if you can find it in its search engine. Both Lileks and Treacher mentioned they liked the new Eminem video; I don't have MTV, but I discovered the launch.com site, called it up, and now I know what they're talking about. I can see the very cool White Stripes Lego video without having to sit through eight hours of MTV commercials.

But there's another nifty feature: you can program your own radio station. You can either base it off of a single band (in which case you'll get a mix of that band and similar bands), or you can go through a quiz and rank a bunch of bands, songs, albums, music genres and sub-genres. The music you say you like will be there; the computer will select other songs for you. If there's a song you hate, you can pretend to be Clear Channel and ban it from future radio-play on your station -- or just hit a fast-forward key and skip to whatever the computer dj selects. With very little effort, I got a radio station that was playing personalized music, and even introducing me to a couple of artists I wasn't previously aware of -- as well as selecting albums that I already knew I liked but had forgotten to list. And only a couple of minutes of commercials an hour. If there was a way to port it to my car stereo, it would be perfect, but I now have background music when I work at home. This is what the Internet is supposed to be about, and it's exciting times we live in.

MICHELLE BOARDMAN suggests that Amazon doesn't go far enough:

A friend once made the seemingly obvious but brilliant suggestion that Amazon merge its database of reader's preferences with an online dating service.

Now, perhaps I dreamt this, but a couple of months ago, I swear that I could click on a link in Amazon and come up with the wish-lists of people with similar purchases and interests to mine. It didn't work especially well (I'm far too promiscuous with my book- and CD- and DVD- purchases; Amazon doesn't distinguish between what I buy because it's cheap over the Internet (or as gifts for friends and family) and what I buy because I'm really interested unless I spend far more time than I do programming in my preferences), but it was a nifty option. I discovered Jonathan Lethem off of a friend's Amazon wish-list, for example; I could surely find other purchasing ideas from strangers. Either they're working the bugs out of it, or privacy advocates freaked out, because I can't seem to find the feature now.

DOWNER: IT'S NO longer possible to order pizzas for Israeli Defense Forces. Some 4000 pizzas had been purchased through the clever scheme (the vast majority from the US), but there was worry that terrorists would take advantage of soldiers used to receiving unsolicited deliveries.