Slow Boat to China Cancelled: Post Office Ends Bulk Rate M-Bags
posted by Deven Desai
NPR reports that the U.S. Post Office has ended its M-bag service, at least the old $1 per pound service which took a long time but as one person interviewed noted that does not matter with books. Now one must pay $3 to $4 per pound and use an air mail service. The problem here is that many charities sending books to Africa, Israel, Indonesia, and elsewhere can no longer afford to send books at the new rates. NPR pointed out that the claim regarding the increase is that the old rate is not viable and impacts the mandate that the Post Office break even in all classes of mail it offers, but apparently the Post Office is not really aware of what the service cost. It does appear that countries are less willing to receive mail at ports other than airports. Some claim that the low-cost surface mail has a political, good-will impact as local schools receive books and know that someone in the U.S. helped them.
The problem reminds me of Maggie Chon’s work regarding intellectual property and development. Her two recent articles, Intellectual Property from Below: Copyright and Capability for Education (Cardozo Law Review) and Intellectual Property and the Development Divide (U.C. Davis Law Review) examine the link between intellectual property and the how it can have a “substantive equality principle, measuring its welfare-generating outcomes not only by economic growth but also by distributional effects.” The piece about education seems all the more pertinent. Insofar as means to distribute hardcopy texts are diminishing, Prof. Chon’s presentation of “A human development framework [which] allows intellectual property norm-setters to prioritize the development of healthy and literate populations” draws attention to the goals of intellectual property and what the system is trying to do not mention offering a potent argument regarding what the goals are. In addition lest one think the postal system is not about distributing information, at least one author, David Henken, details the origins of the U.S. postal service in his book The Postal Age and points out “From its creation, the U.S. Post Office was committed principally to facilitating the wide circulation of political news, allowing an informed citizenry to live far from the metropolitan centers of government while remaining active in its affairs.”
Image: Mail Service Sea Plane, Wikicommons
December 10, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Education, Intellectual Property
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Responses (1)
Scholar - December 15, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Hello all!
Nice to see I’m not the only one interested in this topic. I’ve just created a blog in which I talk about international politics. My last post is titled ‘On technology, privacy, and other challenges in the XXI century’. It talks about cameras, databases, and how Governments and Corporations should manage that data. Feel free to take a look and comment or post there if you want. It doesn’t have any advertising.
It’s here:
http://ladyjusticesscholar.blogspot.com/
See ya!
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