New York Times

[Commentary] In every modern society, the people who hold the levers of state power control the deployment of vast riches; every decision about a change in the tax code or the issuance of oil drilling licenses is worth billions to someone.

The potential beneficiaries of those policies have every incentive in the world to try to influence the decisions.

Influence peddling is the mechanism by which those hoping to sway politicians ultimately reward those politicians. Whether it is ethical or unethical, legal or illegal, depends on what particular compromises a given country has come to accept.

China has had a system in which the understanding is that legal authorities will take a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to family members of high political officials making vast sums. The prosecution of Zhou’s family is a frontal assault on that understanding of what is official corruption.

In the United States, the basic compact has been this: If you take financial benefits from a private interest that seeks to influence policy while in office, it is probably illegal. It’s the same if a close family member does it.

The influence games are different in Washington and Beijing, of course. And not all corruption is created equal; it matters whether a particular variety of official corruption drags down a country’s economy. At the worst extreme, a country where public officials at all levels demand constant bribes as a matter of course will not be a very hospitable environment for business.

But as the Columbia economist Ray Fisman has argued, so long as corruption is predictable and manageable, it can coexist with speedy economic growth (Indonesia under Suharto and China over the last few decades are prime examples). And China has greater state control over more of the economy, and little transparency around who is profiting from that control and why. That is a breeding ground for potential corruption on a scale unknown in the United States.

The Supreme Court seemed to have conflicting impulses in considering a request from television broadcasters to shut down Aereo, an Internet start-up that the broadcasters say threatens the economic viability of their businesses.

On the one hand, most of the Justices seemed to think that the service was too clever by half. “Your technological model,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr told Aereo’s lawyer, “is based solely on circumventing legal prohibitions that you don’t want to comply with.”

But Justice Stephen Breyer, echoing sentiments of other members of the court, said “what disturbs me on the other side is, I don’t understand what a decision” against Aereo “should mean for other technologies,” notably cloud computing.

The Justices seemed keenly aware that their ruling would have vast implications for the broadcast industry and for technical innovations involving cloud computing.

The Digital Public Library of America, a project aimed at providing free online access to the nation’s cultural repositories, has tripled in size to more than seven million items from more than 1,300 institutions since it opened in 2013.

The noncommercial effort, which is based in the Boston Public Library, gained steam following a 2011 federal court ruling that derailed Google’s plan to build the world’s largest digital library. It does not own any of the items in its catalog, but instead allows users to access them both through its own website and through various regional service hubs.

The library’s holdings, which come from institutions ranging from the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library to the Minnesota Streetcar Museum and the Montana Memory Project, include items in more than 400 languages, the project’s executive director, Dan Cohen, said in an interview. They can be accessed by various search tools, including a map that allows users to search for items by state.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who turned 94 recently, is a mild man with an even temperament. He has a reverence for the Supreme Court, on which he served for almost 35 years until his retirement in 2010, and he is fond of his former colleagues.

But there was a hint of anger in some of his remarks when I went to see him last week in his Supreme Court chambers. He said the court had made a disastrous wrong turn in its recent string of campaign finance rulings.

“The voter is less important than the man who provides money to the candidate,” he said. “It’s really wrong.”

He talked about what he called a telling flaw in the opening sentence of last month’s big campaign finance ruling. He filled in some new details about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the Citizens United decision. And he called for a constitutional amendment to address what he said was the grave threat to American democracy caused by the torrent of money in politics.

[Commentary] The New York Times published an article about an Arab citizen of Israel -- a 23-year-old journalist and Palestinian rights advocate -- who was detained by Israeli authorities.

The man, Majd Kayyal, was initially not allowed a lawyer, and he was interrogated for five days on suspicion that he was being recruited by a “hostile organization” after he visited Lebanon. He was released but ordered to be kept under house arrest.

The Times article mentions a court-imposed gag order that was lifted. What it doesn’t mention is that The Times, too, is subject to such gag orders.

According to its bureau chief in Jerusalem, Jodi Rudoren, that is true. The Times is “indeed, bound by gag orders,” Rudoren said. She said that the situation is analogous to abiding by traffic rules or any other laws of the land, and that two of her predecessors in the bureau chief position affirmed to her that The Times has been subject to gag orders in the past.

In the case of article about Kayyal, Rudoren said, “We probably would have written a modest story or brief about this arrest earlier if there had not been a gag order.”

Waiting a day or two until the gag order was lifted may have done no great harm. Still, I find it troubling that The Times is in the position of waiting for government clearance before deciding to publish.

If the law makes that situation unavoidable, a little transparency would go a long way. Either in a sentence within an article or a short editor’s note, The Times can, and should, tell its readers what’s going on.

[Sullivan is the fifth public editor appointed by The New York Times.]

How many people need to use your product before it’s a success? That’s a question European tech companies from Dublin to Dubrovnik routinely ask themselves as they look to move beyond their small local markets to reach bigger audiences.

The preliminary charge brought against Bob Dylan in Paris for what a Croatian organization said was hate speech comparing Croats to Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan has been dropped by a French court.

The charge was filed by the French government after the Representative Council of the Croatian Community and Institutions in France complained about comments Dylan made in a September 2012 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

In the interview Dylan was discussing racism in the United States, and noted that American blacks could sense whether whites had slave-master blood “just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.” At the time, Ivan Jurasinovic, a lawyer for the organization, said that the French Croats were not seeking money or punishment, but hoped that Dylan, whom he described as “a singer who is liked and respected in Croatia,” would apologize.

But it was not quite that simple: under French hate speech laws, he could have been sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 ($62,000). The case was dismissed on a technicality: Dylan, the judge ruled, had not authorized the publication of the comments in France.

“It’s going to be five years before anybody puts his head above the parapet again.” That’s how Michael Weatherly, a member of the British Parliament and intellectual property adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, handicapped the prospects for a fresh legislative push against online piracy in the United States.

Following the defeat in 2012 of the Stop Online Piracy Act, movie companies and other advocates for copyright owners both here and in Britain have been pointed toward voluntarism. That has meant, among other things, agreements under which Internet service providers send escalating warnings to those who are believed to be downloading copyrighted material illegally.

But Weatherly also talked of escalating pressure -- legal and otherwise -- on those who advertise on sites where illegal downloading is taking place. “There are some laws in place, but we might need to beef up a couple of them a bit more,” suggested Weatherly, who spoke of an effort to “strangle the advertising revenue from the illegal sites.”

Dee Dee Myers, once the White House press secretary to President Bill Clinton, will be joining Warner Bros. as executive vice president for worldwide corporate communications and public affairs, the studio said.

Myers replaces Sue Fleishman, who is leaving the post after nine years at Warner.

Myers, who has been a Washington-based communications consultant after co-hosting a political talk show on CNBC and serving as an adviser to "The West Wing," will relocate to Los Angeles and begin work on Sept. 2, Warner said. She will report directly to Kevin Tsujihara, Warner’s chief executive officer, the studio said.

Broadcom announced the guts for a new kind of home router that is says will zip information around the house at up to 3.2 gigabits per second, about twice what a current, high-end home Wi-Fi device can do.

It is meant to handle all kinds of video, to and from phones, tablets, computers and connected televisions. Under good circumstances, a speed like that could send a high-definition movie in significantly less than 30 seconds. In other words, it won’t matter much where the video came from, and it can go anywhere. That is likely to lead to preferences for lower-cost providers, who supply video that can be well displayed among a lot of different sources.