• It's intriguingly difficult for any country that currently uses the euro to try to stop using it and switch to some other form of currency. So difficult, in fact, there's a $400,000 prize for anyone who can figure out a process that would actually work and not create monetary chaos. [url]
• Some Brazilians are using locally-printed currencies instead of its national reais -- such as the capivari, which is just one of the 63 local kinds of money. The capivari is a printed bill (with a picture of a rodent on it!), equal in value to the reai, but retailers give customers discounts for using capivaris (making these local bills into fancy coupons, essentially). [url]
• Last year, the IMF's Dominique Strauss-Kahn proposed an alternative to the dollar in central banks' foreign currency reserves. A system of special drawing rights (SDRs) for central banks would be priced according to international trade instead of any single nation's currency. (It's not an entirely new idea, but it's never caught on.) [url]
• In Vietnam, there's a penalty for posting prices in dollars instead of the local currency. The local currency suffers from high inflation rates, so they might want to look into Brazil's monetary history for some lessons.... [url]
• To discover more stuff on economics, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

Fox and The Simpsons' creator, Matt Groening, developed the idea for the fictional brand, Duff. Therefore, when a real-world manufacturer puts out a product by the same name, one might think that it has stolen Fox's idea and that, as a matter of equity, intellectual property law ought to furnish a remedy. But intellectual property law does not protect ideas in the abstract. While a real-world Duff manufacturer may have taken more than just an idea, it is difficult to articulate how much more. Part of the reason it is so difficult to conceptualize the injury Fox suffers when another producer introduces a Duff Beer to the marketplace stems from the fact that Duff Beer is a fictional product sold in a fictional universe under a fictional brand name. Fox's injury looks very different when we suspend our disbelief and plunge into the fictional world of Springfield, accepting the fictional reality as our own and when we pull back, remind ourselves that The Simpsons is nothing more than a cartoon and view Duff Beer as one element of a vividly imagined work of animated fiction. As a consequence of this puzzle of perspective, Fox suffers a different intellectual property injury depending on our vantage point.

An analogy to Internet law helps explicate the puzzle. Writing on the problem of perspective in this area of the law, Professor Orin Kerr posits that "whenever we apply law to the Internet, we must first decide whether to apply the law to the facts as seen from the viewpoint of physical reality or virtual reality." Kerr terms the perspective from inside virtual reality the "'internal perspective' of the Internet" and the point of view of an "outsider concerned with the functioning of the network in the physical world rather than the perceptions of a user" the "external perspective." In attempting to apply law to the Internet, our perception of who is doing what to whom is not a mere cognitive tool for conceptualizing difficult problems, Kerr contends. Instead, our selection of perspective is itself outcome determinative, because "[b]y choosing the perspective, we choose the reality; by choosing the reality, we choose the facts; and by choosing the facts, we choose the law." While Kerr suggests that courts may dismiss this problem of perspective as "a minor skirmish in the 'battle of analogies,'" he notes that courts "already choose perspectives when they apply law to the Internet" without realizing it.